Simulator generation using an automaton based pipeline model for timing analysis

Abstract

Hardware simulation is an important part of the design of embedded and/or real-time systems. It can be used to compute the Worst Case Execution Time (WCET) and to provide a mean to run software when final hardware is not yet available. Building a simulator is a long and difficult task, especially when the architecture of processor is complex. This task can be alleviated by using a Hardware Architecture Description Language and generating the simulator. In this article we focus on a technique to generate an automata based simulator from the description of the pipeline. The description is transformed into an automaton and a set of resources which, in turn, are transformed into a simulator. The goal is to obtain a cycle-accurate simulator to verify timing characteristics of embedded real-time systems. An experiment compares an Instruction Set Simulator with and without the automaton based cycle-accurate simulator.