This paper presents an RTOS-centric hardware/software cosimulator which we have developed for embedded system design. One of the most remarkable features in our cosimulator is that it has a complete simulation model of an RTOS which is widely used in industry, so that application tasks including RTOS service calls are natively executed on a host computer. Our cosimulator also features cosimulation with functional simulation models of hardware written in C/C++ and cosimulation with HDL simulators. A case study with a JPEG decoder application demonstrates the effectiveness of our cosimulator.

Debugging environments for embedded systems unavoidably depend on the internal structure of the operating system (OS) in order to implement OS support functions. Since the ITRON specification standardizes only the API, the internal structure of operating systems conforming to the ITRON Specification are different, resulting in difficulties in supporting ITRON-Specification operating systems for debugging environments. To solve this problem, we design the ITRON Debugging Interface Specification which is defined as a standard interface for debugging environments supporting ITRON-Specification operating systems. In designing the ITRON debugging interface, we adopt the approach where a module hiding the difference of the internal structure of OS is embedded to the host side. With this method, we are able to achieve the adaptability to a variety of target systems. This paper describes the standardization approach adopted to the ITRON debugging interface. This paper also evaluates the approach's adaptability.

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