Integration of SystemC-AMS Simulation Platforms into TTool

Overview & Synopsis

Embedded systems consist of the integration of software and hardware components, where the latest are increasingly of a heterogeneous nature, composed of digital and analog integrated circuits, sensors and actuators. A heterogeneous modeling, including analog/mixed signal and radio frequency components, is a requirement for the design and development of many embedded systems applications. The integration of analog components into a high-level modeling and virtual prototyping tool, named TTool, is presented here. The idea is to integrate the analog components as targets into a digital model of an MPSoC that runs software under an operating system. The resulting virtual prototype can be simulated at cycle-accurate/bit-accurate level. The development of this thesis is based on the results of a previous work, in which the graphical interface of TTool has been augmented to allow the creation of analog/mixed signal models without including any digital component, and which could already generate operational SystemC-AMS code of the models. The integration tasks are divided in two stages: during the first stage, the integration be- tween the analog and digital components has been implemented independently of TTool, but using the same digital components that TTool uses without running any operat- ing system nor software. In the second stage, the integration of the analog and digital components into TTool has been performed. During this stage, the validation of the analog models at the design level before the generation of the virtual prototype has been implemented. Two case studies are presented to demonstrate the outcome of this work. First, a rover system is modeled, consisting of an MPSoC digital platform and the models of two analog sensors. A virtual prototype including embedded software is generated and simulated based on this model. Second, a model of a vibration sensor is created and its virtual prototype is generated and simulated. The results of the simulation of this model, along with the validation at the design level are compared against the outcomes of the model being simulated directly using SystemC-AMS and SystemC-MDVP. Several other models are presented to expose particular problems that may arise during the integration of analog and digital models, specially when dealing with the interaction of Discrete Event and Timed Data Flow Models of Computation. These models are also used to compare the behavior of the results of this work with the behavior from the models created directly using SystemC-AMS and SystemC-MDVP.