Methodologies for High-Level Modelling and Evaluation in the Automotive Domain

As design complexity increases, today's HDL-based design flows push the capabilities of designers and tools to the limit. In recent years, ambitious efforts at increasing the abstraction level of formal design languages have been presented in order to overcome these limitations. Nevertheless, certain parts of all systems still have to be described in detail. Unfortunately, even small analog parts can slow down a global system simulation significantly. It is therefore necessary to generate abstract models with reduced but adequate result accuracy for these "bottleneck" components. This paper presents a novel approach to the automated generation and evaluation of abstract behavioural models for automotive applications. Our methodology aims at achieving a convincing speedup in global system verification by accelerating the transient simulation of the crucial analog and mixed-signal components. The speedup results not only from an increased level of abstraction but also from a fast generation of circuit equations without the need for numerical integration. The approach is able to handle nonlinear circuits by employing piecewise linear models. The use of a SystemC interface will allow effortless integration into manifold simulation environments.