Scalable techniques for system-level cosimulation and coestimation

A system-level design approach that enforces a separation between system behaviour and architecture is presented. The system designer focuses first on system behaviour, then looks for a suitable architecture to implement it, and finally verifies the performance. Techniques and tools are described to accurately evaluate the performance of a system at different levels of abstraction. The evaluation must be done dynamically, in a simulation framework, to capture runtime interaction among tasks and with the environment model. Moreover, it should be fast enough to enable the exploration of several algorithmic and architectural solutions in the search for the best implementation. Tunable models, where the designer can trade accuracy for speed, are essential for this purpose.