A non-intrusive timing synchronization interface for hardware-assisted HW/SW co-simulation

This paper proposes using a non-intrusive timing synchronization interface approach to facilitate shared-data synchronization for fast and accurate hardware-assisted HW/SW co-simulation. Our synchronization interface device is specially designed for nontransparent components. With the device, we can systematically monitor shared-data accesses on a bus and control the progressing time of hardware-assisted components for fast and accurate system co-simulation. Experiments show that our approach is 10 to 140 times faster than the cycle-based hardware-assisted co-simulation approach.