Scalable and flexible cosimulation of SoC designs with heterogeneous multi-processor target architectures

In this paper, we present a cosimulation environment that provides modularity, scalability, and flexibility in cosimulation of SoC designs with heterogeneous multi-processor target architectures. Our cosimulation environment is based on an object-oriented simulation environment, SystemC. Exploiting the object orientation in SystemC representation, we achieve modularity and scalability of cosimulation by developing modular cosimulation interfaces. The object orientation also enables mixed-level cosimulation to be easily implemented; thereby the designer can have flexibility in trade off between simulation performance and accuracy. Experiments with an IS-95 CDMA cellular phone system design show the effectiveness of the cosimulation environment.