In a system-level design flow, the transition from a high-level description entry implies the refinement from an untimed, unpartitioned description to a real architecture where applications are executed on a programmable device and interact with ad-hoc hardware components. Simulation of such architectures requires the capability of efficient co-simulation of a model of hardware with a model of the processor.

This paper presents two co-simulation methodologies, based on SystemC as hardware modeling language and on an Instruction Set Simulator (ISS) as a model of the processor. The first one works at the SystemC kernel level and exploits potentialities of the GNU suite, whereas the second uses features offered by the operating system running on the ISS.

The two methodologies improve co-simulation performance with respect to state-of the art methods, and provide different trade-offs between the simplicity of the programming model, the modeling power, and co-simulation performance.