Analog Models Manipulation for Effective Integration in Smart System Virtual Platforms

Analog components are fundamental blocks of smart systems, as they allow a tight interaction with the environment, in terms of both sensing/actuation and communication. This impacts on the design of the overall system, and mainly on the validation phase, that thus requires the joint simulation of digital and analog aspects. In this scenario, this paper proposes the automatic conversion of analog models to C++-based languages, to remove the overhead of co-simulation with traditional virtual platform tools. The proposed methodology allows to convert a given analog description to either (1) a fully equivalent description, or (2) an abstract representation for faster simulation which models only the aspects of interest. Effectiveness and correctness have been proved on a number of case studies, that highlight the effectiveness and potentiality of the proposed methodology.