A smooth refinement flow for co-designing HW and SW threads
Paolo Destro, Franco Fummi, Graziano Pravadelli · 2007
Separation of HW and SW design flows represents a critical as-pect in the development of embedded systems. Co-verification be-comes necessary, thus implying the development of complex co-simulation strategies. This paper presents a refinement flow that de-lays as much as possible the separation between HW and SW con-current entities (threads), allowing their differentiation, but pre-serving an homogeneous simulation environment. The approach relies on SystemC as the unique reference language. However, Sys-temC threads, corresponding to the SW application, are simulated outside the control of the SystemC simulation kernel to exploit the typical features of multi-threading real-time operating systems run-ning on embedded systems. On the contrary HW threads maintain the original simulation semantics of SystemC. This allows design-ers to effectively tune the SW application before HW/SW partition-ing, leaving to an automatic procedure the SW generation, thus avoiding error-prone and time-consuming manual conversions. 1.