Moving from co-simulation to simulation for effective smart systems design

IEEE Trans. Comput.-Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst.

Fraccaroli

et al. 2018

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Analog components are fundamental blocks of smart systems, as they allow a tight interaction with the environment, in terms of both sensing/actuation and communication. This impacts on the design of the overall system, and mainly on the validation phase, that thus requires the joint simulation of digital and analog aspects. In this scenario, this paper proposes the automatic conversion of analog models to C++-based languages, to remove the overhead of co-simulation with traditional virtual platform tools. The proposed methodology allows to convert a given analog description to either (1) a fully equivalent description, or (2) an abstract representation for faster simulation which models only the aspects of interest. Effectiveness and correctness have been proved on a number of case studies, that highlight the effectiveness and potentiality of the proposed methodology.

Section: Application To a Smart System Scenariomentioning

confidence: 99%

“…analog components requires the construction of co-simulation frameworks, at the price of an increase of simulation time, that heavily impacts on time-to-market [15], [34].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Analog Models Manipulation for Effective Integration in Smart System Virtual Platforms

IEEE Trans. Comput.-Aided Des. Integr. Circuits Syst.

Fraccaroli

et al. 2018

Self Cite

“…The most straightforward solution consists of integrating different tools, each native of a specific aspect of the system [15]- [18]. Despite guaranteeing the correctness in the modeling of specific aspects, this solution introduces heavy and error-prone overheads in the integration of the different tools [12].…”

Section: B Heterogeneous Smart System Simulationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…sions [8]- [11]. Such extensions may allow to include in a single simulation multiple aspects of the same system, all implemented with the same language and managed by the same simulation kernel [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

IP-XACT for smart systems design: extensions for the integration of functional and extra-functional models

2016 Forum on Specification and Design Languages (FDL)

Macii

et al. 2016

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Smart systems are miniaturized devices integrating computation, communication, sensing and actuation. As such, their design can not focus solely on functional behavior, but it must rather take into account different extra-functional concerns, such as power consumption or reliability. Any smart system can thus be modeled through a number of views, each focusing on a specific concern. Such views may exchange information, and they must thus be simulated simultaneously to reproduce mutual influence of the corresponding concerns. This paper shows how the IP-XACT standard, with some necessary extensions, can effectively support this simultaneous simulation. The extended IP-XACT descriptions allow to model extra-functional properties with a homogeneous format, defined by analysing requirements and characteristic of three main concerns, i.e., power, temperature and reliability. The IP-XACT descriptions are then used to automatically generate a skeleton of the simulation infrastructure in SystemC. The skeleton can be easily populated with models available in the literature, thus reaching simultaneous simulation of multiple concerns.

“…The tight interaction with the physical environment makes Smart Systems extremely heterogeneous objects [4], relying on countless different technologies and consequently requiring heterogeneous expertise and tools for their design. Previous work [1] showed how system simulation may benefit from reducing heterogeneity to homogeneous models, while raising abstraction in order to work at System-level. This paper goes further, by proposing a concrete automatic design flow for smart systems, that unifies heterogeneous descriptions into homogeneous models, that can be the starting point for wellestablished System-Level Design (SLD) flows.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A unifying flow to ease smart systems integration

2016 IEEE International High Level Design Validation and Test Workshop (HLDVT)

Fummi

2016

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This paper proposes a meet-in-the-middle approach for the modeling and simulation of heterogeneous systems. The starting point is a set of heterogeneous models, developed by adopting the designer's favorite design language and formalism. The methodology exploits automatic translation, abstraction and integration flows to generate a single homogeneous system-level description, that allows fast system simulation. The approach is supported by two novel design domain/abstraction level taxonomies, that generalize a state-of the art taxonomy [1] to identify what characteristics would allow efficient system-level simulation, together with the transformations that must be applied to the starting model to achieve them. The advantage of the approach on system design and prototyping is particularly evident on any kind of highly heterogeneous systems, such as smart systems. The overall automatic flow has been implemented and applied to an open-source case study to measure the performance of each identified abstraction level, and the impact of the proposed methodology.