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This paper presents the implementation and evaluation of a hardware and software co-simulation tool. Different simulators, which can be geographically distributed, compose this environment. The communication between simulators is done using a co-simulation backplane. The co-simulation backplane reads a file describing how the modules are connected, automatically launches the simulators and controls the simulation process. A case study is used as a benchmark to validate the implementation and to evaluate the system performance using different hardware-software partitions.

This paper discusses a case study, the multilanguage design of a robot arm controller. The system is composed of two parts: the controller and the motors of the robot arm. The design starts with a multilanguage system-level specification. SDL was used for the description of the controller and Matlab was used for the description of the physical behavior of the motors. The multilanguage design flow includes the refinement of the modules and the refinement of the communication between these modules described in different languages. In order to validate the overall system through the design steps, cosimulation is performed at different levels of abstraction. This experiment shows that system level model may provide an early mock-up of the design before refining the intermodule communication.

The complexity of modern embedded systems requires the cooperation of several teams belonging to different cultures and using different languages as well as the reuse of software, hardware and communication IP modules at the early design steps. The key issue for the design of such systems is the overall system validation and the synthesis of the communication between the different subsystems. In this paper we focus on the problem of multi-level communication synthesis and show the results of the application of this methodology on an example. Designers get feedback at all design steps via the cosimulation engine that permits fast evaluation.