Virtual hardware prototyping through timed hardware-software co-simulation

Designers of factory automation applications increasingly demand tools for rapid prototyping of hardware extensions to existing systems and verification of resulting behaviors through hardware and software co-simulation. The paper presents a framework for the timing-accurate co-simulation of HDL models and their verification against hardware and software running on an actual embedded device of which only a minimal knowledge of the current design is required. Experiments on real-life applications show that early architectural and design decisions can be taken by measuring the expected performance on the models realized using the proposed framework.