A Framework for Interactive Refinement of Mixed HW/SW/Analog Systems

Abstract:
Increasing complexity and heterogeneity leads to systems that combine the aspects of both digital hardware/software and analog/mixed-signal systems. A major difficulty is the fact that the components for analog/mixed-signal systems are designed rather bottom-up, while a digital hardware/software system is designed top-down. Often this requires co-simulation, in practice involving multiple simulators from different vendors and on different platforms. Unfortunately, setting up co-simulations is a time-consuming task which is therefore done only a few times for verification purposes. In this paper we propose a framework that automatically handles different design configurations (e.g. at different levels of abstraction) and communication between different simulators. We show that the effort for designers for setting up an overall system simulation is reduced significantly. This permits to validate system integration of analogue and hardware/software subsystems more often and in a more interactive way.