Exploiting TLM and object introspection for system-level simulation

The introduction of Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) allows a system designer to model a complete application, composed of hardware and software parts, at several levels of abstraction. The simulation speed of TLM is orders of magnitude faster than traditional RTL simulation; nevertheless, it can become a limiting factor when considering a Multi-Processor System-On-Chip (MP-SoC), as the analysis of these systems can be very complex. The main goal of this paper is to introduce a novel way of exploiting TLM features to increase simulation efficiency of complex systems by switching TLM models at runtime. Results show that simulation performance can be increased significantly without sacrificing the accuracy of critical application kernels.