A Remote Software/Hardware Co-simulation Platform for SoC Design

As an efficient technique to accelerate system-on-chip (SoC) design, software/hardware co-simulation gives a flexible method to simulate hardware and software simultaneously and save the time-to-market. In this paper, a platform of software/hardware co-simulation is implemented, which utilize a debugger to interconnect the server and the design under test (DUT) on remote FPGA board via Internet. The software environment and hardware environment are run on the server and remote FPGA board respectively. The debugger establishes a real-time bidirectional data path between them and performs the data conversion. The embedded interface module can be synthesized with user's DUT smoothly. This platform takes full advantage of software's flexibility and hardware's high speed, supports remote operation and various types of co-simulation modes, while consumes few hardware resource.