SOAP Based Distributed Simulation Environment for System-on-Chip (SoC) Design

In this paper we present a distributed simulation environment for System-on-Chip (SoC) design. Our approach enables automatic generation of, geographically distributed, SystemC simulation models for IP-based SoC design and eases communication between heterogeneous parts of the simulation. The SystemC simulation model follows a client/server architecture, where each client/server should contain some IPs composing the system. The number of distributed SystemC simulators used in the simulation platform is not a priori limited a priori. The communication between them is made using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) trough communication standards as XML and HTML. The feasibility of our method is shown by an example composed by four SystemC modules, simulated on three hosts.