Mixed SW/SystemC SoC Emulation Framework

Developing HW modules for standard platforms like PCs or embedded devices requires a complete system emulator availability to detect and fix bugs on developed HW, Operating Systems (OS) drivers and applications. This paper presents a set of plug-ins to an open-source CPU emulator that enables mixed simulations between platforms emulators and hardware (HW) modules described in SystemC. In this paper three plugins for QEMU are described: one for connecting TLM SystemC modules to any bus QEMU emulates, one for connecting SystemC to PCI bus for PC based platform and one plug-in for connecting SystemC to AMBA bus for ARM platforms. With this framework, it is possible to develop OS drivers at the same time HW is developed and final application tested running in this virtual platform.