A Multi-View Co-Modeling and Co-Simulation Framework for Heterogeneous Embedded Systems

The design of embedded platforms for connected objects (smartphones and beyond) is made harder because such systems must satisfy stringent constraint beyond functional correctness and accuracy. Namely, extra-functional requirements such as performance, power consumption and thermal dissipation are equally important, while there are important trade-offs between them. In the recent years so-called virtual platform-based design has been proposed, so that rather abstract models of functional and extra-functional views could be applied, together with application models seen as task graphs with performance and memory requirements , to simulate global system dynamics before hardware was actually built. While a truly based Model Driven Engineering approach, tools and methods from this methodological area were seldom used in the process , which mainly consist of SystemC multiform simulation in practice. But, increasingly, dedicated domain-specific simulation tools, appear in the landscape, and the way to combine them properly for co-simulation becomes a true issue. It is our belief that joint multi-view modeling is key as the co-modeling approach to occur prior to co-simulation. This is all the more true as the various views/aspects here meant to be co-simulated are not distinct components of a system, as one generally assume, but distinct facets of a same component. For instance in our case a SystemC simu-lator may be found to extract abstract execution traces (or uns) from a generator program, traces which will be further annotated and decorated in the other distinct extra functional view ranges (performance, power, temperature), whose results may in turn impact the forthcoming rest of the trace. We provide a multiview modeling framework, and then show as an example how to connect it with a real (co)-simulation tool such as Synopsys Platform Architect MCO.