Evaluation of Trade-Offs in the Design of Embedded Systems Via Co-Simulation

Current design methodologies for embedded systems often force the designer to evaluate early in the design process architectural choices that will heavily impact the cost and performance of the final product. Examples of these choices are hardware/software partitioning, choice of the micro-controller, and choice of a run-time scheduling method. This paper describes how to help the designer in this task, by providing a flexible co-simulation environment in which these alternatives can be interactively evaluated. Our approach is based on the Ptolemy co-simulation framework, but it uses a different modeling paradigm, well suited for control-dominated reactive systems (asynchronous extended Finite State Machines called CFSMs). We build on previous research on software synthesis and cost estimation to provide the designer with fast but reasonably accurate performance data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach by showing the result of the trade-off analysis on a dashboard control..