An improved data communication mechanism for a SOC hardware/software co-emulation environment

HW/SW co-emulation technique combing software simulation with hardware acceleration is one of the popular techniques for SOC verification, where interrupt-based communication mechanism is usually utilized. However, communication overhead will be resulted from data exchange between hardware side and software side at every cycle. A stream-mode based HW/SW co-emulation technique is proposed and presented in the paper. In the proposed technique, software side executes, sends stimulus data and receives response data continuously while hardware side is testing SUT and generating response data in parallel. Experiment result demonstrates that, compared to interrupt-based communication mode, stream-based communication mechanism can improve communication throughput by more than 10 times.