Automatic HW/SW interface modeling for scratch-pad and memory mapped HW components in native source-code co-simulation

Abstract

Native execution of instrumented code is commonly used for early, high-level SW simulations. SW code developed for a target platform is executed in a host computer for fast functional verification and performance estimations. However, as the native platform is different than the target platform, directly writing the peripheral registers or handling scratch pad memories makes the native execution to crash. Previous works require manual recoding to solve this problem. This paper presents a library that automatically solves the problem of simulating directly, fixed memory accesses. HW accesses are detected at run-time in the native execution and redirected to a target platform model. Thus, native HW/SW co-simulation is performed without any recoding effort. Both peripherals only requiring data transfers and peripherals also requiring communication event delivery are automatically managed.