SimSoC: A SystemC TLM integrated ISS for full system simulation

International audienceThe development of embedded systems requires the development of increasingly complex software and hardware platforms. Full system simulation makes it possible to run the exact binary embedded software including the operating system on a totally simulated hardware platform. Whereas most simulation environments do not support full system simulation, or do not use any hardware modeling techniques, or have combined different types of technology, SimSoC is developing a full system simulation architecture with an integrated approach relying only upon SystemC hardware modeling and transaction-level modeling abstractions (TLM) for communications. To simulate processors at reasonably high speed, SimSoC integrates instruction set simulators (ISS) as SystemC modules with TLM interfaces to the other platform components. The ISSpsilas use a variant approach of dynamic translation to run binary code. The dynamic translator uses pre-compiled code that consists of specialized functions for instruction execution, using partial evaluation techniques. It is generated by a configurable code generator, which makes it possible to tune the generated code to optimize simulation speed for the target software application