Open Access Research Article

A Framework for System-Level Modeling and Simulation of Embedded Systems Architectures

Cagkan Erbas*, Andy D Pimentel, Mark Thompson and Simon Polstra

Author Affiliations

Computer Systems Architecture Group, Informatics Institute, Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam, Kruislaan 403, SJ Amsterdam 1098, The Netherlands

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EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems 2007, 2007:082123 doi:10.1155/2007/82123


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jes.eurasipjournals.com/content/2007/1/082123


Received:31 May 2006
Revisions received:7 December 2006
Accepted:18 June 2007
Published:29 July 2007

© 2007 Erbas et al.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The high complexity of modern embedded systems impels designers of such systems to model and simulate system components and their interactions in the early design stages. It is therefore essential to develop good tools for exploring a wide range of design choices at these early stages, where the design space is very large. This paper provides an overview of our system-level modeling and simulation environment, Sesame, which aims at efficient design space exploration of embedded multimedia system architectures. Taking Sesame as a basis, we discuss many important key concepts in early systems evaluation, such as Y-chart-based systems modeling, design space pruning and exploration, trace-driven cosimulation, and model calibration.

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