An efficient simulation environment and simulation techniques for Bluetooth device design

Abstract

Validation of an System-on-Chip (SoC) design with networking capability needs global simulation of the whole system including the network as well as the SoC design itself. Especially, it is needed to validate the interoperability of SoCs from different vendors. In this paper, we propose a simulation environment and simulation techniques for efficient validation of such SoC designs and apply them to networked Bluetooth SoC designs. The environment enables two types of simulation. One is modular enough to include the simulation of other vendors' Bluetooth devices and the other is optimized to achieve fast simulation in developing in-house Bluetooth devices. Especially, the former is scalable in that it keeps the constant simulation runtime despite the increase of the number of Bluetooth devices. Since multiple simulators are involved, the global simulation is still slow. Thus, the simulation efforts need to be minimized to shorten the design cycle. We present two simulation techniques, a concept called grouped message for reduction in simulation runtime and a system debug scenario called fix–modify–restart for reduction in the number of simulation runs. The former is to reduce inter-process communication overhead between simulators in the global simulation. The latter is to reduce repeated simulation runs in the conventional design cycle. Experimental results show the scalability of the presented simulation environment, reduction in simulation efforts by two simulation techniques.