Real-time embedded system modeling by introducing hardware-in-the-loop concept to SystemC

Abstract

As the demand for interaction of embedded systems with other systems is constantly increasing, the need to extend the model of the embedded system to include the other systems that are being interacted with is increasing, too. This results in degraded accuracy of the whole model and increased modeling e ort. New modeling techniques have to be developed to reduce design e ort without decreasing overall system accuracy. On the other hand, complexity and time-to-market constraints demand early simulation, veri cation, and architectural exploration of systems. Hence, in this dissertation, a new design concept and new methods have been proposed to apply the hardware-in-the loop technique to the eld of hardware/software co-design of industrial embedded systems using SystemC as the modeling environment. First of all, the hybrid channel has been conceptualized to clearly de ne the communication between real and virtual (modeled) subsystems. For real to virtual communication, novel methods have been developed for incorporating external events to the SystemC simulation. Additionally, a method has also been proposed for generating concurrent outputs from virtual to real subsystems as timely as possible. SystemC kernel has been patched for hard real-time execution and the underlying operating system has been ameliorated to guarantee an upper bound for the overall system latency. Furthermore, a mathematical model has been set up to estimate the execution performance of a given model. The performance of the proposed set of methods has been experimented on some industrial embedded systems. A stable operating frequency of 10 KHz and an I/O performance of sub-millisecond round-trip time over Ethernet have been observed. In an experiment to observe the method's performance in a real-life environment, a non-timed transactionlevel model of a BACnet Broadcast Management Device (BBMD) interacting with real devices outperformed a competing real system up to 80 times in maximum response time.