Hardware/Software Co-Simulation (PORTAL)

I devised PORTAL as a means for validating our hardware accelerator cores (ASVP in SMECY) in a co-simulated environment together with control software. The basic structure of PORTAL is shown below:

PORTAL is a a communication library that connects a hardware model simulated in ModelSim to its control software running on a PC. Communication is done over TCP/IP.

In PORTAL the primitive communication abstraction is a shared memory. All PORTAL clients have a common access to a (virtually) shared 32-bit address space. Any client can dynamically claim and register any unoccupied memory range in the address space and start to serve read/write requests generated by other clients. Management of the virtual address space is dedicated to the central sever, PHUB.

In our use case, each ASVP core typically has 4 data memory banks and 2 to 3 control banks (firmware, control/status, vector partitions). In co-simulation environment the VHDL top level test-bench registers each bank as a memory extent with the PHUB server and serves accesses to the banks. Meanwhile, the ASVP master control program that runs on a PC also connects to the PHUB, discovers the ASVP core’s memory extents and presents them using WAL (Worker Abstraction Library) to the software.