'Virtual systems’ link ESL, model-driven engineering

Hardware and software developments have been following separate but parallel evolutions to address the common challenges of increasing complexity and shrinking development time for electronic devices. These evolutions are producing a similar result - hardware and software developers are looking to design at higher abstraction levels. Hardware design has gone from gate-level design to RTL design, while embedded software design has gone from assembly code to procedural and object-oriented programming languages such as C and C++.

Today, the hardware and software worlds are in the midst of a concurrent structural evolution. This evolution not only represents the next stage of abstraction above RTL and programming languages, but also offers an opportunity for a common development paradigm.

Those two parallel evolutions have different names but have much in common. The hardware world calls this evolution ESL (electronic system level), with SystemC as a key driving technology. The software world calls this evolution model-based design or MDE (model-driven engineering), with the Object Management Group model-driven architecture - MDA - known as its most popular representative. Unified Modeling Language (UML) and its various flavors, and Matlab/Simulink, are the leading MDE technologies.

From a high-level perspective, ESL implies working with models and generating other models or code for the following:
• System architecting (virtual systems)
• Early software development (virtual platforms)
• Verification (virtual prototypes)
• Hardware implementation (high-level synthesis)
Simulating the execution of an electronic system that consists of both hardware and software requires a common platform. Today, most ESL virtual platforms provide the same software execution paradigm as RTL virtual prototypes: ISS (instruction-set simulators) for executing C/C++. This is not in phase with where the software design goes, which is MDE.



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