Accurate and Efficient Continuous Time and Discrete Events Simulation in SystemC

摘要

The AMS extensions of SystemC emerged to aid the virtual prototyping of continuous time and discrete event heterogeneous systems. Although useful for a large set of use cases, synchronization of both domains through a fixed timestep generates inaccuracies that cannot be overcome without penalizing simulation speed. We propose a direct, optimistic, and causal synchronization algorithm on top of the SystemC kernel that explicitly handles the rich set of interactions that occur in the domain interface. We test our algorithm with a complex nonlinear automotive use case and show that it breaks the described accuracy and efficiency trade-off. Our work enlarges the applicability range of SystemC AMS based design frameworks.