Communication-Driven Automatic Virtual Prototyping for Networked Embedded Systems

Today, parts of an ESL model can be automatically synthesized to a low-level implementation, e. g., via high-level synthesis. However, to build a complete working virtual prototype directly from a given ESL model, one still has to perform several design steps manually. The work-at-hand tackles this problem by introducing bridge components already in the ESL model. These components influence Design Space Exploration (DSE) by adding their characteristics like cost and latency into evaluation. The complete system is divided into several subsystems connected through bridges, we call this process communication-driven decomposition. Once an optimized implementation solution is found by DSE and selected by the designer, every subsystem of this ESL model is handed over to the individual synthesis tool. Here, if two subsystems will be synthesized by different tools, the bridge connecting these two subsystems will be automatically duplicated into two instances and assigned to each subsystem. Then, synthesis tools generate code for each subsystem (including the bridge inside each subsystem). In the last step, the system integration process merges the corresponding bridge pairs together to build a complete virtual prototype. To automate the proposed design flow, we have developed a framework that automatically divides an ESL model into subsystems and synthesizes the interfaces for all bridges which strongly simplifies system integration. The designer is therefore free from the interface realization. Hence, the overall design development cycle is shortened. As a proof of concept, a distributed control application is presented to give evidence of the proposed technique's applicability and the achieved productivity gain.