A Mixed-level Co-simulation Method for System-level Design Space Exploration
Mark G. Thompson, Andy D. Pimentel, Simon Polstra, Cagkan Erbas · UvA-DARE (University of Amsterdam) · 2006
The Sesame modeling and simulation framework aims at efficient system-level design space exploration of embedded multimedia systems. A primary objective of Sesame is the exploration at multiple levels of abstraction. As such, it targets gradual refinement of its (initially abstract) architecture performance models while maintaining architectureindependent application specifications. In this paper, we present a mixed-level co-simulation method, called trace calibration, for incorporating external simulators into Sesame’s abstract system-level performance models. We show that trace calibration only requires minor modification of the incorporated simulators and that performance overheads due to co-simulation are minimal. Also, we show that trace calibration transparantly supports distributed co-simulation, allowing for effectively reducing the system-level simulation slowdown due to the incorporation of lower-level simulators. 1