An integrated cosimulation environment for heterogeneous systems prototyping

In this paper, we present a hardware-software cosimulation environment for heterogeneous systems. To be an efficient and convenient verification envir onment for the rapid prototyping of heterogeneous systems consisting of har dware and software components, the environment supports (i) modular cosimul ation, (ii) cosimulation acceleration, and (iii) integrated user interface and internal representation. For modular cosimulation, we treat software an d hardware components as separate processes that communicate with each othe r only through inter-process communication. We generate interface model aut omatically and insert between software and hardware components. We can acce lerate cosimulation through hardware-emulation using FPGAs which also suppo rts our incremental system prototyping strategy. Finally, to provide an int egrated user interface and internal representation consistent with Various prototyping tasks, we modified and extended Ptolemy, a cosimulation and cos ynthesis environment for heterogeneous systems. The benefits of our cosimul ation environment are as follows: expandability of the environment, target architecture and protocol independence, interface transparency, seamless tr ansition to cosynthesis, cosimulation speedup, and convenient cosimulation. As experimental examples, we cosimulated and prototyped several heterogene ous systems successfully, which shows that our environment can be a useful heterogeneous systems specification/verification environment for fast proto yping.