Simulation at Cycle Accurate and Transaction Accurate Levels Fre´de´ric Pe´trot and Patrice Gerin

Abstraction Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156 6.3 Cycle Accurate Simulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 6.4 Transaction Accurate Simulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 6.5 Summary and Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

6.1 Introduction Simulation is a primary technology in integrated circuit and integrated system

design. It has been an intensive field of work since the start of the micro-electronic ages, because it is the only way of validating circuits that either cannot be analytically described or whose size cannot be handled analytically by a designer, i.e., practically speaking all circuits. As such, designing a circuit or a complete electronic system means writing lines of codes in a language suited to model a specific type of behavior. The simulation aims at making sure that the circuit indeed behaves as expected, by applying patterns and having the user checking the results.