Search

International audience; Cyber-Physical Systems consist of cyber components controlling physical entities. Their development involves different engineering disciplines, that use different models, written in languages with different semantics. A coupled simulation of these models is of prime importance to rapidly understand the emerging system behavior. The coupling of the simulations is realized by a coordinator that conveys data and ensures time consistency between the different models/simulators. Existing coordinators are usually time triggered. In this paper we show that time-triggered coordinators may introduce poor performance and accuracy (both temporal and functional) when used to co-simulate cyber-physical models. Therefore, we propose a new coordinator mixing time-and event-triggered mechanisms. We validated the approach in the context of the FMI standard for co-simulation. To make possible the writing of the new coordinators , we implemented backward compatible extensions to the FMI API. Also, we implemented a new FMI exporter in an industrial tool.

International audience; Virtual prototyping allows designers to set up an electronic system level software simulator of a full HW/SW platform to carry out SW development and HW design almost in parallel. To achieve the goal virtual prototyping tools allow the co-simulation between an efficient instruction set simulator, mainly based on dynamic binary translation of the target code, and simulation kernels for HW models, described by means of traditional hardware description languages, like, for example, SystemC. In this context, some approaches have been proposed for co-simulation between QEMU and SystemC, both from EDA companies and academic research groups. On the contrary, no paper addresses integration between Open Virtual Platform (OVP) and SystemC. Indeed, OVP models and the related simulator can be integrated into SystemC designs by using TLM 2.0 wrappers and opportune OVP APIs. However, this solution presents some disadvantages, like the incapability of supporting cycle-accurate models, and the necessity of re-design, in terms of SystemC modules, all OVP components that should be integrated in the target platform. To avoid such drawbacks, and provide an easy way to port SystemC models from a QEMU-based to an OVP-based virtual platform and vice versa, this paper presents a common co-simulation approach that works for integrating SystemC components with both QEMU and OVP. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.