Pre-simulation elaboration of heterogeneous systems: The SystemC multi-disciplinary virtual prototyping approach

Designers of the upcoming digital-centric More-than-Moore systems are lacking a common design and simulation environment able to efficiently manage all the multi-disciplinary aspects of its components of various nature that closely interact with each other. A key to successful design and verification lies in a SystemC-based virtual prototyping environment that is able to simulate a complex heterogeneous system as a whole, for which each component is described and solved using the most appropriate Model of Computation (MoC). In this paper, we present a new generic MoC-independent elaboration scheme that aims at preparing a Virtual Prototype (VP) for simulation. It requires to check the correct composition of the system model through dimensional analysis, to explore the model structure to identify involved MoC and interfaces between MoCs, and to detect the underlying dependencies. Eventually, information extracted from the exploration allow the instantiation of MoC-specific solvers. To soundly handle the global model execution with a Discrete Event (DE) kernel as the main solver, synchronization mechanisms with master-slave semantics within the model structure are implicitly deduced.