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SEE ALSO
Solution: Transaction-Level Modeling
Solution: Pre-silicon SW Validation
Solution: HW/SW Co-Verification
Solution: ESL Co-Emulation
Datasheet: TLM-2.0 Transactor Adapter
Datasheet: PCI Express Transactor
Datasheet: AXI Transactor
Datasheet: Next Gen System Validation Using Transactors
Product: ZEMI-3
HW/SW Validation of PCI-Express Devices
Electronic-System Level (ESL)
ESL Virtual Platforms are powerful tools to enable early software development and architectural exploration. However, there is often a need to integrate RTL models into the ESL environment, either for legacy blocks, or because a cycle-accurate model is required. This can cause a severe performance degradation when executing the RTL model in a simulator. And since ESL transaction-level modeling is not cycle accurate, it is necessary to create an adapter to bridge the gap between the ESL and RTL worlds.
Transaction-based ZeBu ESL Co-Emulation provides the ideal methodology to integrate RTL models into ESL environments, providing multi-MHz execution of the RTL models and supporting millions of transactions per second. Whether using EVE's extensive library of off-the-shelf transactors, or writing custom transactors with ZEMI-3, ZeBu transactors easily bridge the gap between the transaction-level modeling of the ESL Virtual Platform, and the cycle level execution to the RTL model. ZeBu emulators also support the TLM-2.0 modeling standard through the ZeBu TLM-2.0 transactor adapter. This adapter provides ZeBu model interoperability, and further facilitates the easy bring-up of ESL Co-Emulation environments.
In addition to the ease of bring-up and performance, the ESL Co-Emulation environment includes extensive hardware debug capabilities on top of those provided by the ESL platform, including: backdoor memory access, waveform dumping, and clock control. The emulated design never loses synchronization with the Virtual Platform, and transactors are fully reproducible and deterministic, making ESL Co-Emulation perfect for HW/SW Co-Verification.