Removal of unnecessary context switches from the systemc simulation kernel for fast VP simulation

Virtual prototypes are widely employed in today's development of embedded hardware and software. To model and simulate the VPs, SystemC has been adopted as a standard language tool. With SystemC, hardware modules and software codes can be modeled as processes. To model concurrency, one process can be suspended and then the SystemC scheduler selects the next process to resume. This is also known as context switching. Context switching can consume a large portion of simulation time and decrease the simulation performance heavily. In this paper, a method is proposed to avoid unnecessary context switches. It achieves this by taking concurrency into account to determine the necessity of a context switch. The case study shows that, by applying the method, performance could be increased significantly without any loss in simulation accuracy.