Communication and Co-Simulation Infrastructure for Heterogeneous System Integration

With the increasing complexity and heterogeneity of embedded electronic systems, a unified design methodology at higher levels of abstraction becomes a necessity. Meanwhile, it is also important to incorporate the current design practice emphasizing IP reuse at various abstraction levels. However, the abstraction gap prohibits easy communication and synchronization in IP integration and co-simulation. In this paper, we present a communication infrastructure for an integrated design framework that enables co-design and co-simulation of heterogeneous design components specified at different abstraction levels and in different languages. The core of the approach is to abstract different communication interfaces or protocols to a common high level communication semantics. Designers only need to specify the interfaces of the design components using extended regular expressions; communication adapters can then be automatically generated for the co-simulation or other co-design and co-verification purposes