Rapid prototyping of a portable HW/SW co-design on the virtual zynq platform using SystemC

A virtual platform by Cadence modelling a Xilinx Zynq-7000 is used to realize an electronic control unit (ECU) in a hardware/software co-design approach. In the examples of a Cruise Control and an adaptive cruise control, parts of the ECU application can be mapped on the emulated ARM9 processor, while other parts reside in the simulated FPGA hardware surrounding the ARM cores. We propose to specify both sorts of modules in SystemC as a technique for rapid prototyping. The virtual prototype built to show the feasibility of this approach is connected to a simulated car (LabCar) for tests in a safe, yet realistic environment.