• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.35 no.9_10
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• pp.485-496
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• 2008

As the complexity of SoC (System-on-Chip) design increases dramatically. traditional system performance analysis and verification methods based on RTL (Register Transfer Level) are no more valid for increasing time-to-market pressure. Therefore a new design methodology is desperately required for system verification in early design stages. and hardware software (HW-SW) cosimulation at TLM (Transaction Level Modeling) level has been researched widely for solving this problem. However, most of HW-SW cosimulators support few restricted ion levels only, which makes it difficult to integrate HW-SW cosimulators with different ion levels. To overcome this difficulty, this paper proposes a multipurpose framework for HW SW cosimulation to provide systematic SoC design flow starting from software application design. It supports various design techniques flexibly for each design step, and various HW-SW cosimulators. Since a platform design is possible independently of ion levels and description languages, it allows us to generate simulation models with various ion levels. We verified the proposed framework to model a commercial SoC platform based on an ARM9 processor. It was also proved that this framework could be used for the performance optimization of an MJPEG example up to 44% successfully.

• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.33 no.12
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• pp.867-879
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• 2006

This paper concerns fast and time accurate HW/SW cosimulation for MPSoC(Multi-Processor System-on-chip) architecture where multiple software and/or hardware components exist. It is becoming more and more common to use MPSoC architecture to design complex embedded systems. In cosimulation of such architecture, as the number of the component simulators participating in the cosimulation increases, the time synchronization overhead among simulators increases, thereby resulting in low overall cosimulation performance. Although SystemC cosimulation frameworks show high cosimulation performance, it is in inverse proportion to the number of simulators. In this paper, we extend the novel technique, called virtual synchronization, which boosts cosimulation speed by reducing time synchronization overhead: (1) SystemC simulation is supported seamlessly in the virtual synchronization framework without requiring the modification on SystemC kernel (2) Parallel execution of component simulators with virtual synchronization is supported. We compared the performance and accuracy of the proposed parallel SystemC cosimulation framework with MaxSim, a well-known commercial SystemC cosimulation framework, and the proposed one showed 11 times faster performance for H.263 decoder example, while the accuracy was maintained below 5%.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.43 no.10 s.352
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• pp.68-73
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• 2006

This, paper proposes a cosimulation methodology that results in an efficient SoC design as well as fast verification by integrating HDL, SystemC, and algorithm-level abstraction using the design tools Active-HDL and Matlab's Simulink. To demonstrate the proposed design methodology, we implemented the design technique on a serial connection multi-channel speaker system. We have demonstrated the proposed cosimulation method utilizing an ARM processor based SoC Master board with the AMBA bus interface and a Xilinx Vertex4 FPGA. The proposed method has the advantage of simultaneous simulation verification of both software and hardware parts in high levels of abstraction mixed with some performance critical parts in more concrete RTL codes. This allows relatively fast and easy design of a speaker connection system which typically requires significant amount of data processing for verification.