Enabling heterogeneous cycle-based and event-driven simulation in a design flow integrated using the SPIRIT consortium specifications

The practical application of electronic system-level (ESL) design has been a key challenge of transaction-level modeling (TLM) methodologies in the past few years. While the benefits of ESL are well known, making the investment pay-off has required two key factors to be resolved: the simulation speed of the virtual platform model has to be fast enough to enable software design, and the flow from ESL design to implementation has to be seamless. We introduce two themes to address these issues: cycle-based simulation and a multi-vendor design-flow integrated using the IPXACTTM specifications from The SPIRIT Consortium. Through experimentation with the ARM RealView® SoC Designer flow, and the Synopsys coreAssembler tool and Galaxy suite of tools, we show that competent solutions to both of these adoption issues exist in the industry today.