iSAVE: a behavioral emulator for in-system algorithm verification

Abstract

This paper presents a behavioral emulation system called iSAVE (in-System Algorithm Verification), which performs in-system verification of the behavioral description in C of a chip in the context of its application board at the early design stage. We were able to significantly increase the emulation speed by modeling the interface of the target chip with both the software part, which runs as thread, and the hardware part, mapped into FPGA logic. The proposed idea is validated by demonstrating the behavioral emulation of MP3 decoder chip, as obtained from the public domain MP3 program.