Mixed-level cosimulation for fine gradual refinement of communication in SoC design

In this paper we propose a method of mixed-level cosimulation that enables gradual refinement of SoC communication from protocol-neutral communication to protocol-fixed communication. For fine granularity in refinement, the method enables the designer to perform channel refinement and module refinement. Thus, the designer can perform more extensive design space exploration in communication refinement. We show the effectiveness of the proposed method in a case study of communication refinement is an IS-95 CDMA cellular phone system design