Integration of mixed-signal components into virtual platforms for holistic simulation of smart systems

Nowadays, the design of applications based on smart systems requires the joint simulation of both digital and analog aspects. Even if analog-mixed-signal (AMS) extensions of hardware description languages are an enabling factor, they do not provide a general methodology for the integration of AMS models into digital virtual platforms. This paper defines the problem and provides two main contributions: 1) the automatic conversion of analog models from Verilog-AMS to C++/SystemC, to remove the overhead of co-simulation with traditional virtual platform tools, and 2) the automatic abstraction of analog conservative models, with the goal of increasing simulation speed. Experimental results show that the virtual platform with automatically integrated analog components is 40 times faster than co-simulation with Verilog-AMS, and the increase of speed due to abstraction is more than 100%.