A Flexible and Complexity-Aware H/W Design with SystemC Using Integrated Prototyping

In recent years, many embedded system prototyping tools have been developed. Generally, they can be classified into two categories: physical prototyping (PP), virtual prototyping (VP). The integration of these prototyping tools is valuable because it will speed up time-to-market and decrease the cost of design. To reinforce such effects, we introduce a new prototyping concept of modeling prototyping (MP). In this paper, first we propose a flexible and reusable H/W design environment by integrating PP, MP and VP based on JavaBeans. Second, we try to bridge between MP and PP using a new library called SCPP. Since they can communicate with each other, if prototyping modules are distributed across PP and VP, the design complexities in MP will be alleviated. Third, we devise a general template for sensors and actuators in MP to transfer data from a virtual controller to PP. We demonstrate how our proposed integrated prototyping framework can be used flexibly in different tools. We also show how this framework can mitigate the H/W design complexity by taking an example of a simple elevator.