Miami: a hardware software co-simulation environment

Increasing time to market pressures, greater design complexity and increasing software content are driving systems designers to look towards new ways of performing system validation. Hardware and software design teams are using separate tools to develop different components that will work closely together in a system. Combining these design environments holds the promise of finding problems earlier in the design cycle. The key to a successful integration of these technologies is to provide sufficient performance to run reasonable amounts of software. This paper describes a system which integrates an event driven hardware simulator with an instruction set simulator. This system allows dynamic partitioning of the code and data space between the hardware and software simulators. This capability provides performance sufficient for running software without sacrificing the accuracy required by the hardware simulator.