Co-synthesis and co-simulation of control-dominated embedded systems

This paper presents a methodology for hardware/software co-design with particular emphasis on the problems related to the concurrent simulation and synthesis of hardware and software parts of the overall system. The proposed approach aims at overcoming the problem of having two separate simulation environments by defining a VHDL-based modeling strategy for software execution, thus enabling the simulation of hardware and software modules within the same VHDL-based CAD framework. The proposed methodology is oriented towards the application field of controldominated embedded systems implemented onto a single chip.