Co-simulation of Functional SystemC TLM Models with Power/Thermal Solvers

Modern systems-on-chips need sophisticated power-Management policies to control their power consumption and temperature. These power-management policies are usually implemented partly in software, with hardware support. They need to be validated early, hence power and temperature-aware simulation techniques at the system-level need to be developed. Existing approaches for system-level power and thermal analysis usually either completely abstract the functionality (allowing only simple scenarios to be simulated), or run the functional simulation independently from the non-functional one. The approach presented in this paper allows a coupled simulation of a SystemC/TLM model, possibly including the actual embedded software, with a power and temperature solver such as ATMI or the commercial tool ACEplorer. Power and temperature analysis is done based on the stimuli sent by the SystemC/TLM platform, which in turn can take decisions based on the non-functional simulation.