A procedure for software synthesis from VHDL models

Addresses the problem of software generation from a hardware description language (HDL). In particular, we examine the issues involved in translating VHDL into C or C++ for use in system simulation and cosynthesis. Because of the concurrency supported by VHDL, and a notion of timing behavior, care must be taken to ensure behavioral correctness of the generated software. The issues involved are shown to be different in each of the application areas. The ideas set forth in this paper have been used in an efficient VHDL simulator designed to execute on multiprocessor systems. Results are presented for simulation on uniprocessor as well as multiprocessor systems.