Component-based synthesis of embedded systems will lead to the reuse of a vast library of hardware and software components and also facilitate rapid prototyping. However it is still low key, a primary reason being the lack of a systematic attempt at the development of automatic component matching algorithms.The main task of such an algorithm is to map a design function to a device from a library of system-level components. In this paper, we propose a novel notion of simulation called forced simulation to formalize the correspondence between a function and a device. What distinguishes forced simulation from other techniques is the idea of forcing via an external interface, which can be automatically synthesized, and is useful for adapting the system level component to the given design functionality. We propose a new component matching algorithm based on forced simulation and illustrate it via the example of mapping a Lathe Controller port to Intel 82C55 in mode 2.