Hardware-software co-simulation for medical X-ray control units

Abstract

In this paper we present our solution to master the complex-ity of product adaption cycles of a medical X-ray controlunit. We present the real hardware and software platformand our mapping of it to a virtual X-ray control unit, im-plemented as our hardware-software co-simulation. To re-duce complexity for hardware developers, we developed ourown XML-based abstract system description language whichis mapped onto instantiations of parameterizable SystemCtemplate modules. We verified the correctness of our virtualX-ray control unit by co-simulating unmodified software tohardware components, which we implemented in our systemdescription language from the specification of the real sys-tem. Due to reduced complexity of our virtual X-ray controlunit, it can be used as a time and cost saving test platformfor future hardware and software adaption cycles.

Keywords

• hardware-software co-simulation
• virtual machines
• qemu
• systemc