Design and Implementation of a Cosimulation Environment for Heterogeneous Microelectronic Systems

In recent years existing development methods have undergone a progressive advancement. Rising design complexity, the need to reduce time-to-market, and the integration of heterogeneous fields like electronics, mechanics, and software into a single product have been demanding a steadily enhancement of existing design environments, tools, and methods. Today simulation is a standard technology featured by almost every design process. Simulations incorporating different design stages of single parts of the system enable the validation of the design in respect of its specification during the entire design process, as well as the verification of single development steps. Therefore it is possible to detect design flaws, misinterpretations of interfaces and the results of error-prone design team communication like out-of-date specifications and poorly communicated model changes as early as possible. Heterogeneity of system descriptions poses a severe challenge to simulation. However distinctive features of single design languages, the availability of well tested design solutions, valuable experience of engineers in special languages and tools, or even the integration of foreign solutions may result in a heterogeneous system description. Simulators featuring multiple design languages and methods are scarcely available. Therefore simulator couplings try to provide solutions for the simulation of heterogeneous system through a combination of appropriate simulators via special interfaces. Similar interfaces enable the integration of real hardware or emulators into the simulation, to accomplish a simulation speedup. For the realization of a cosimulation various approaches are available, implementing single aspects like the synchronization of the single simulators in different ways. In this work a cosimulation environment for design processes using Simulink, Modelsim and SystemC is developed. To achieve a cosimulation, network connections are used to synchronize the single simulators data-driven and cycle-based.