Conceptual/Functional Co-Simulation Technique for Embedded Systems

Modern systems are increasingly complex and heterogeneous like mixed-signal systems and real-time controllers. In particularly, embedded systems become more complex caused by the diverse functionality integrated into the same system. There are several challenges faced by embedded system's developers as the choice of modeling/simulation level and environments. Embedded system is based on Discrete Event model. The system's design should take into consideration the selected abstraction level. In literature, there are three main levels: conceptual level, functional level, and physical level. Usually, developers try to simulate the system's behavior at earlier stage of design with a higher precision and adequate customization. As an attempt, this paper proposes a co-simulation technique to synchronize between conceptual level and functional level. This attempt tries to benefit from advantages of each level. The conceptual level provides more details about the data flow status and the functional level returns the real service time instead the estimation. The co-simulation model was implemented in the case of Arena and SystemC environments and evaluated using a motion detection system as an illustrative application. The performance evaluation is based on accuracy and the simulation time.