A Cross-Debugging Method for Hardware/Software Co-design Environments

Software debugging in hardware simulation environments is often inconvenient and extremely slow. The BackC method described in this paper allows one to reproduce accurately the simulated code flow under a conventional pure software debugging environment, while greatly decreasing the test turnaround time, thereby drastically reducing debugging time. The described method has been successfully implemented and used during a chip hardware and embedded software co-design. It can be applied to any conventional simulation environment used for co-design verification.