Design Domains and Abstraction Levels for Effective Smart System Simulation

Design of smart systems needs to cover a wide variety of domains, ranging from analogue to digital, with power devices, micro-sensors and actuators, up to MEMS. This high level of heterogeneity makes design a very challenging task, as each domain is supported by specific languages, modeling formalisms and simulation frameworks. A major issue is furthermore posed by simulation, that heavily impacts the design and verification loop and that is very hard to be built in such an heterogeneous context. On the other hand, achieving efficient simulation would indeed make smart system design feasible with respect to budget constraints. This work provides a formalization of the typical abstraction levels and design domains of a smart system. This taxonomy allows to identify a precise role in the design flow for co-simulation and simulation scenarios. The chapter also aims at enhancing reuse and integration by showing how stateof-the-art and commercial tools can ease the adoption of homogeneous simulation, with automatic code generation from lower abstraction levels and automatic integration of heterogeneous interfaces. As a result, the chapter builds a comprehensive modeling and simulation framework that supports digital, analogue, and circuit-level descriptions simultaneously.