An Internet-based HW/SW Co-Simulation Platform for VLSI design

In this paper, we present an Internet-based hardware/software co-simulation platform. HW/SW co-simulation integrates traditional software and hardware simulations simultaneously by typically running them on separated environments. The proposed platform enhanced traditional HW/SW co-simulation mechanism by supporting Internet-based remote co-simulation. Two interconnected subsystems, local subsystem and remote subsystem, communicate with each other through TCP/IP protocol for supporting Internet data transmission. Local subsystem is typically a workstation or a computer with software environment running on it. The remote subsystem is implemented on an embedded processor and FPGAs in which the design under test and a stimulus generator and response capturer module are integrated. This mechanism makes this platform flexible and efficient. Some experiments are performed to evaluate the simulation speed by changing the frequency of certain component as well, and the speed bottleneck of whole platform is analyzed.