The next generation of virtual prototyping: Ultra-fast yet accurate simulation of HW/SW systems

Virtual Prototypes (VPs) have been now widely adopted by industry as platforms for early SW development, HW/SW co-verification, performance analysis and architecture exploration. Yet, rising design complexity, the need to test an increasing amount of software functionality as well as the verification of timing properties pose a growing challenge in the application of VPs. New approaches overcome the accuracy-speed bottleneck of today's virtual prototyping methods. These next-generation VPs are centered around ultra-fast host-compiled software models. Accuracy is obtained by advanced methods, which reconstruct the execution times of the software and model the timing behavior of the operating system, target processor and memory system. It is shown that simulation speed can further be increased by abstract TLM-based communication models and efficient hardware peripheral models. Additionally, an industrial flow for efficient model development is outlined. This support of ultra-fast and accurate HW/SW co-simulation will be a key enabler for successfully developing tomorrow's multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) platforms.