An engineering environment for hardware/software co-simulation
D. Becker, Raj K. Singh, Stephen G. Tell · 1992
We describe an environment supporting concurrent hardware and software engineering for high performance systems. In place of a conventional bread-boarded prototype, we used distributed communicating processes to allow software and simulated hardware to interact. We extended the Cadence Verilog-XL simulator to enable software debugging and testing using hardware simulation. The environment was proven during a successful system design. 1 Introduction Many applications demand system designs with high performance packed in a small space. Prototyping practices such as wire-wrapping or bread-boarding cannot handle the speed and density of these high performance systems. Even the first prototype must be a printed circuit board. Debugging an assembled board is time consuming and difficult. Modifications are often impossible without building a new board. Hardware simulation handles these challenges with tools that analyze the design at speed and account for the effects of physical layout on s...