SimSoC: A full system simulation software for embedded systems

The development of embedded systems requires the development of increasingly complex software and hardware platforms. Full system simulation makes it possible to run the exact binary embedded software including the operating system on a totally simulated hardware platform. Whereas most simulation environments do not support full system simulation, or do not use any hardware modeling techniques, or have combined different types of technology, SimSoC is developing a full system simulation architecture with an integrated approach relying only upon SystemC hardware modeling and transaction level modeling abstractions (TLM) for communications. To simulate processors at reasonably high speed, SimSoC integrates instruction set simulators (ISS) as SystemC modules with TLM interfaces to the other platform components. The ISS's use a variant approach of dynamic translation to run binary code. The paper describes the overall architecture of the SimSoC full system simulator, a description of the ISS implementation and integration with some other components. A final section reports results obtained, in particular simulation of an existing System On Chip that can run the Linux operating system.