For the development of software for networked embedded systems it is important to have a cycle-accurate simulation of these systems. One important problem of this simulation is its long execution time. In this talk it will be shown, how this problem can be solved using a combination of a simulation-based approach with an analytical approach. This hybrid approach combines the advantages of both approaches.
Using this hybrid approach, in a first step the binary code of the program running on the embedded system is analyzed. For the second step there are two possibilities to get a cycle-accurate SystemC program out of the software that will run on the embedded system. Both of them will be shown in the talk. The first possibility is to transform the C source code of the program into a SystemC program and annotate it with cycle information gained from the analysis. The second possibility is to take the binary code of the program and use it to generate annotated SystemC code. The biggest benefit of our approach is, that both generated codes can be annotated by additional dynamic correction code that considers effects of the branch prediction and the caches during run-time and improves the cycle-accuracy.