An integrated co-simulation interface for mixed-level system-on-chip design: Presentation held at CDNLive!, 10.-11. September 2007, San Jose, USA, Silicon Valley 2007

The continuously increasing complexity of today's embedded electronic systems strongly requires including system level into design and verification. An ideal top-down design flow would use a system-level model as the executable specification and testbench within which analog or mixed-signal blocks can be developed and verified. This paper describes the co-simulation link between the system-level simulator, Matlab-Simulink, and a mixed-signal simulation environment, AMS Designer. After a detailed description of the implementation and the two synchronization algorithms for framed and unframed data, the co-simulation is demonstrated using the design of a wireless LAN system. Simulating such a complex system-design at the transistor level is not even possible within the design cycle time and simulating the entire design at the system level is not as accurate as transistor-level simulations. This session will demonstrate that performance and accuracy tradeoffs can easily be made using this approach and will demonstrate how to reduce interface problems and increase design efficiency and quality by allowing the different blocks to be revised and tested within the overall system