ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the related co-simulation step and its role in the global design flow. Co-simulation is involved in several steps of the proposed flow in order to perform dynamic analysis on the system features, check the functional correctness of the specification, and check the quality of the solution provided by the partitioning and architecture selection tool. The functional simulation allows checking the system functionalities to verify their correctness with respect to typical input data sets. The chapter addresses the system-level co-simulation step. It describes the general co-simulation issues, the proposed approach, by analyzing in detail the model and the methodology that characterize it, and shows the result obtained through the application of the proposed approach. A crucial problem in designing multi-processor embedded systems is the possibility of efficiently comparing the timing behavior of different system configurations to select, during the early stages of the design process, a suitable tradeoff between performance and cost.
