Seamless Hardware/Software Performance Co-Monitoring in a Codesign Simulation Environment with RTOS Support

Simulation monitoring tools are needed in hardware/software codesign for performance debugging, model validation and hardware/software partitioning purposes. Existing tools are either hardware- or software-centric and lack integrated and seamless co-monitoring. This paper presents a system-level co-monitoring tool that can monitor the computation and communication activities of SystemC user modules, as well as bus, memory and processor usage, on a variety of hardware/software embedded configurations that may include an RTOS. We also describe how performance metrics are generated during or after simulation and made accessible to users or external applications. Finally, experimental results show that such co-monitoring does not disturb the simulation's internal timing and only moderately increases the simulation's wall clock run time (by 11-22% for hardware/software partitioned architectures)