A Smooth Refinement Flow for Co-designing HW and SW Threads

Separation of HW and SW design flows represents a critical aspect in the development of embedded systems. Co-verification becomes necessary, thus implying the development of complex co-simulation strategies. This paper presents a refinement flow that delays as much as possible the separation between HW and SW concurrent entities (threads), allowing their differentiation, but preserving an homogeneous simulation environment. The approach relies on SystemC as the unique reference language. However, SystemC threads, corresponding to the SW application, are simulated outside the control of the SystemC simulation kernel to exploit the typical features of multi-threading real-time operating systems running on embedded systems. On the contrary HW threads maintain the original simulation semantics of SystemC. This allows designers to effectively tune the SW application before HW/SW partitioning, leaving to an automatic procedure the SW generation, thus avoiding error-prone and time-consuming manual conversions