Hardware, software and mechanical cosimulation for automotive applications

The design of automotive systems requires the joint design of hardware, software and micro-mechanical components. In traditional design approaches the different parts are designed by separate groups and the integration of the overall system is made at the final stage. This scheme may induce extra delays and costs because of interfacing problems. The paper presents a new automotive system design approach that offers many advantages including efficient design flow and shorter time to market. The key idea of our approach is to allow for early validation of the overall system through co-simulation. The design starts with a high level specification of each part. In our approach, software is described in C, hardware is described in VHDL and mechanical parts are described in MATLAB. A C-VHDL-MATLAB co-simulation is then used for functional validation of the initial specification. During the design process, the hardware and software parts may be refined using specific techniques and tools. The refinement steps are also validated through co-simulation. In this approach we use two kinds of co-simulation: untimed co-simulation is used for functional validation and timed co-simulation for real time validation. The paper describes the design approach and its successful application to an example from the automotive industry.