An integrated hardware-software cosimulation environment with automated interface generation

We present a hardware-software cosimulation environment for heterogeneous systems. To be an efficient system verification environment for the rapid prototyping of heterogeneous systems, the environment provides following features: interface transparency, smooth transition to cosynthesis, simulation acceleration, and integrated user interface and internal representation. Among them, the first two are more important than the others. To support these two features, we have developed automatic interface generation schemes. As demonstrating experiments, two heterogeneous systems performing same function with different target architectures were cosimulated and prototyped successfully in our environment. The experimental results show that our environment can be a useful heterogeneous system specification/verification environment for rapid prototyping.