SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR SIMULATION OF INTEGRATED HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE COMPONENTS

A system and methods are provided to design, verify and develop simulated hardware and software components for a desired electrical device. The system includes a cycle-accurate simulator where X-number of simulator cycles is equivalent to Y-number of cycles on a simulated hardware component. The system further includes a simulator library for modeling and verifying hardware components of a desired electronic device. The simulator library includes built-in models and routines for simulating multiple internal hardware components. The simulator library is used with the cycle-accurate simulator. The system also includes a simulation Application Program Interface ("API") for allowing user-customized model and routines of internal and external hardware components to be used with the cycle-accurate simulator. The system can be used to design, verify and develop on-chip and off-chip components for a system-on-a-chip used in a desired electrical device. The methods provided include first method to simulate a requested operation for a simulated component far in the future with a fixed-length cycle counter by adjusting internal cycle counts in the cycle-accurate simulator for the requested operation and for the fixed-length cycle counter. A second method is used to send a not-ready response for a requested operation, when the requested operation takes longer than an estimated number of cycles in the cycle-accurate simulator. The system and methods allow for detecting access errors, bus faults, invalid address translations, privilege protection violations, alignment violations and other timing and behavior violations for simulated hardware and software components and the integration thereof.