SystemC: A Homogenous Environment to Test Embedded Systems

The SystemC language is becoming a new standard in the EDA field and many designers are starting to use it to model complex systems. SystemC has been mainly adopted to define abstract models of hardware/software components, since they can be easily integrated for rapid prototyping. However, it can also be used to describe modules at a higher level of detail, e.g., RT-level hardware descriptions and assembly software modules. Thus, it would be possible to imagine a SystemC-based design flow, where the system description is translated from one abstraction level to the following one by always using SystemC representations. The adoption of a SystemC-based design flow would be particularly efficient for testing purpose as shown in this paper. In fact, it allows the definition of a homogeneous testing procedure, applicable to all design phases, based on the same error model end on the same test generation strategy. Moreover, test patterns are indifferently applied to hardware and software components, thus making the proposed testing methodology particularly suitable for embedded systems. Test patterns are generated on the SystemC description modeling the system at one abstraction level, theta, they are used to validate the translation of the system to a lower abstraction level. New test patterns are then generated for the lower abstraction level to improve the quality of the test set and this process is iterated for each translation (synthesis) ste

A Combined Approach to Validate the Design of Embedded Network Devices

To validate an embedded network device it is important to insert it in a model of a real system and test its interaction with the surrounding blocks and used protocols. The proposed methodology joins two simulation environments, both based on the C++ programming language. The first (SystemC) is both a hardware definition language and a simulation library designed to model and simulate hardware and software systems:. The second (Network Simulator 2) is both a network definition language and a simulation tool designed to model and simulate network topologies. The aim of the paper concerns the analysis of the efficient integration of the two modeling/simulation environments. The proposed methodology; joining together SystemC and Network Simulator 2, has been applied to an example embedded network device based on the IEEE 1355 protocol