A flexible hybrid simulation platform targeting multiple configurable processors SoC

Multiple Configurable Processors System-on-Chip (MCPSoC) platforms have both performance and power advantages for embedded applications. Unfortunately, at early design stages, because of the processor configuration, I/O device changes and MCPSoC architecture modifications, designers waste much time on the Operating System (OS) porting work with general Instruction Set Simulator (ISS) based SoC simulation platforms. In this paper, we propose a hybrid simulation platform which uses general ISS and implements the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and I/O device driver APIs with the SystemC modules on host machines directly. This hybrid simulation platform can shorten the application validation process by avoiding assembly code and hard-coded address modifications of traditional OS porting work. We show the advantages of our new hybrid simulation platform with a video decoding case study in the end.