System level modeling of real-time embedded software

This paper describes a methodology for developing abstract and executable system-level model in SystemC of real-time embedded software, targeted to an RTOS. Our objective is to reuse as much of the software as possible to minimize model development time. Therefore, we design a RTOS emulation layer on top of the SystemC kernel. The application software is linked against the emulation layer to create an executable model of the software. The model can be integrated into system level HW-SW models which can be used for fast, accurate and early system validation. We validated our models using industrial-size examples such as MP3 decoder and Vocoder. The experimental results show that our models are very accurate and significantly faster than software execution on target platform.