Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Emulation of CMS systems is an interesting approach to complete the validation of new digital control unit and to perform the diagnosis tasks. However to be efficient, the emulator have to run in real time in order to reproduce exactly the physical process functioning.

Today, realization of this emulator is not possible using standard electronic components. Therefore, we oriented our work to the development of new embedded systems specific to these applications of emulation.

This report describes the design of this emulator employing the system-level design methodology developed at CECS-UC Irvine (SpecC methodology). Starting from the abstract executable specification written in SpecC language, different design alternatives concerning the system architecture (components and communications) are explored and the emulator is gradually refined and mapped to a final communication model. This model can then be used with backend tools for implementation and manufacturing. For illustration of this approach, we discuss at the end of this report the case of a DC system emulator and we describe in details the different stages undergone.