A Mixed-level Co-simulation Method for System-level Design Space Exploration

The Sesame modeling and simulation framework aims at efficient system-level design space exploration of embedded multimedia systems. A primary objective of Sesame is the exploration at multiple levels of abstraction. As such, it targets gradual refinement of its (initially abstract) architecture performance models while maintaining architecture-independent application specifications. In this paper, we present a mixed-level co-simulation method, called trace calibration, for incorporating external simulators into Sesame's abstract system-level performance models. We show that trace calibration only requires minor modification of the incorporated simulators and that performance overheads due to co-simulation are minimal. Also, we show that trace calibration transparently supports distributed co-simulation, allowing for effectively reducing the system-level simulation slowdown due to the incorporation of lower-level simulators