Formal and Practical Techniques for the Complex System Design Process using Virtual Prototypes

This book deals with formal and practical approaches for early fast modeling and verification of complex digital processor hardware and software using SystemC-based virtual prototypes. As a special focus, modeling approaches of instruction-level behavior of System-on-Chips and the connected off-chip digital devices are addressed. Featured verification approaches are based on symbolic execution of simulated hardware devices or on classical discrete execution of the whole system with dynamic data flow tracking. The approaches are accompanied by Case-Studies that develop and build on top of an open-source RISC-V SoC simulation.

In Particular, this book:

• Discusses modeling, simulation and verification for complex digital system design, based on RISC-V case-studies;
• Presents established and novel techniques to model and verify HW/SW designs with a Virtual Prototype-based design flow;

• Focuses on early and approachable design space exploration of complex SoC designs for accelerated, low-risk development.

Auteur

Pascal Pieper received the M.Sc. in computer science from the University of Bremen, Germany, in 2018. He received the Dr.-Ing. Degree in 2023 as a Researcher within the Group of Computer Architecture, University of Bremen, Germany, and is working as an embedded software developer for the German Aerospace Center in the Institute of Space Systems since then. His research interests include modeling and verification of critical embedded systems, with a focus on system level virtual prototypes and user-friendly simulation based HW/SW co-design to improve the quality of software and hardware as a whole.

Rolf Drechsler is head of Cyber-Physical Systems department at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) since 2011. Furthermore, he is a Full Professor at the Institute of Computer Science, University of Bremen, since 2001. Before, he worked for the Corporate Technology Department of Siemens AG, and was with the Institute of Computer Science, Albert-Ludwig University of Freiburg/Breisgau, Germany. Rolf Drechsler received the Diploma and Dr. Phil. Nat. degrees in computer science from the Goethe-University in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, in 1992 and, respectively, 1995. Rolf Drechsler focusses in his research at DFKI and in the Group for Computer Architecture, which he is heading at the Institute of Computer Science of the University of Bremen, on the development and design of data structures and algorithms with an emphasis on circuit and system design.