Design Domains and Abstraction Levels for Effective Smart System Simulation

Abstract

Smart systems cover a wide variety of domains, ranging from analogue to digital, with power devices, micro-sensors and actuators, up to MEMS. This high level of heterogeneity makes design a very challenging task, as each domain is supported by specific languages, modeling formalisms and simulation frameworks. A major issue is furthermore posed by simulation, that heavily impacts the design and verification loop and that is further complicated by such an heterogeneous context. This chapter provides a formalization of the typical abstraction levels and design domains of a smart system, with the goal of identifying a precise role in the design flow for co-simulation and simulation scenarios. Moreover, a methodology is proposed to move from the co-simulated heterogeneity to a simulatable homogeneous representation of the entire smart system at two level of abstraction: functional level and transactional level. At functional level, all components are implemented in C++, with the goal of understanding the role of the underlying synchronization and simulation semantics and their overhead on simulation performance. At transactional level, two wide-spread simulation frameworks, i.e., SystemC and SystemVue, are adopted to ease code integration, even in presence of very heterogeneous design flows.