System co-simulation interfacing an instruction set simulator with systemc

Abstract

During the last years, the productivity of digital electronic systems has not been able to keep pace with Moore’s Law, which announces that the number of transistors incorporated in an integrated circuit increases twofold every two years. I n addition to this growth in terms of complexity, the current characteristics of the market as well as the ever-increasing cost of electronic systems development and production are squeezing the micro-electronic industry that longs to find a solution. With the advent of Transaction Level Modelling (TLM), a new level of abstraction, and SystemC, an open source system level description language, the industry has found a new breakthrough in system development by means of an earlier architecture exploration of a system and an earlier development of the software. Co-simulation of hardware and software also takes advantage of SystemC language and TLM, making easy and faster the integration of this two platforms, being the most common approach the use of SystemC to model the hardware and an Instruction Set Simulator (ISS) to model software part. I n this thesis an approach to interface an ISS with a SystemC model is described in order to achieve compatibility and extensibility between hardware and software, and with the ultimate goal of constructing models of complex systems.