A simulation environment for hardware-software codesign

Abstract

Our goal is to create a simulation environment for hardware-software codesign. It is important to perform simulation of the hardware/software system at various stages of the codesign process. In our environment the hardware and software are viewed as two independent processes in which the hardware is described in a hardware description language and the software is written in a programming language. The processes can be placed on separate machines and run in parallel. Analysis of the environment has shown that significant simulation speed-ups can be achieved if a high degree of parallelism exists between the hardware and software and if there is a sufficient amount of computational CPU time in the software process.