ChronoSym: a new approach for fast and accurate SoC cosimulation

The early validation of modern SoC is not anymore feasible using traditional cycle-accurate cosimulations. These are based on the concurrent execution between SW running on multiple Instruction Set Simulators and HW simulators. The challenge is then speeding-up the simulation, without sacrificing the accuracy of traditional methods. The key contribution of this paper is a novel fast and accurate HW/SW cosimulation approach, allowing to handle large SoCs, while reducing the design cycle. The key underlying concepts are timed native SW execution, combined with detailed HW/SW interaction models. This approach is implemented in ChronoSym tool and applied to two real SoC applications.