A Virtual Prototype Semihosting Approach for Early Simulation of Cyber-Physical Systems

An early design space exploration of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) is a challenging task due to multi-domain areas and tight interaction of computing systems (cyber) and environment actuation, communication and sensing (physical). The CPS designer must be able to rapidly evaluate various solutions and to verify if project constraints were met. In this paper, we propose a CPS development framework based on Virtual Prototype (VP) to provide a high level of abstraction models to accurately simulate CPS behavior, using target independent semihosting interfaces and assessing performance and timing constraints. The experiments show a high timing accuracy in CoreMark and Dhrystone compute-intensive benchmarks and a low overhead in I/O intensive tasks for semihosting access of host resources, such as files and memory. An ECG heart rate detection case study was implemented using heterogeneous interfaces to demonstrate how hardware, human and software components can be seamlessly integrated to exchange real world data.