Interactive cosimulation with partial evaluation

Abstract

We present a technique to improve the efficiency of hardware-software cosimulation, using design information known at simulator compile-time. The generic term for such optimization is partial evaluation. Our contribution is that we apply the optimization transparently to the user, and at multiple abstraction levels in the simulation. We use the technique to create an interactive codesign environment, and evaluate it on several designs including an AES encryption coprocessor and a Viterbi decoder, and for several instruction-set simulators. Compared to SystemC-based cosimulation, we achieve comparable cosimulation performance at only a fraction of the model-build time.