Modeling and evaluation of hardware/software designs

We introduce the foundation of a system modeling environment targeted at capturing the anticipated interactions of hardware and software behaviors-not just their co-execution. Key to our approach is the separation of external and internal design testbenches. We use a frequency interleaved scheduling foundation ideally suited to our approach because it allows unrestricted hardware and software modeling, a mix of untimed and timed software, and a layered approach using software schedulers and protocols to resolve software to resource time budgets. We illustrate our approach by discussing how architectural corner cases that arise due to interacting hardware and software behaviors can be a meaningful digital modeling concept. In addition to characterizing the response of a system when viewed as a black box, we characterize the response of the design to anticipated design changes. We include examples and simulation results