Accurate and Efficient Continuous Time and Discrete Events Simulation in SystemC

International audience; The AMS extensions of SystemC emerged to aid the virtual prototyping of continuous time and discrete event heterogeneous systems. Although useful for a large set of use cases, synchronization of both domains through a fixed timestep generates inaccuracies that cannot be overcome without penalizing simulation speed. We propose a direct, optimistic, and causal synchronization algorithm on top of the SystemC kernel that explicitly handles the rich set of interactions that occur in the domain interface. We test our algorithm with a complex nonlinear automotive use case and show that it breaks the described accuracy and efficiency trade-off. Our work enlarges the applicability range of SystemC AMS based design frameworks.