Hardware Simulator Development

Abstract

Hardware Simulator is very important tool for large projects with many variants. The Development of hardware simulator project is directed towards the emulation of micro-controller based smart card technology to be used under secure identifica- tion solutions. One of the major impediments behind the development of hardware simulator is early prototyping of hardware. Once the programmer has speci ed the algorithmic aspects of the program using high-level interface, automatic methods like simulator can be used to determine a mapping of solution requirements of program to parallel hardware, which saves time to market and overall cost to market of product. While the hardware is still in development phase to eliminate the wait for hardware to be readily available and to save the experimental costs on hardware, hardware simulator is the best tool. I developed hardware simulator for micro-controller based smart card consists of modules such as CPU (here in this context controller), co-processors, clock, memory management unit to control memory units. Salient features of this hardware simu- lator are: user friendly, accurate, compatible, reliable, fast and maintenance-free. It can also provide additional debug capabilities like Code Coverage and performance profiling. Hardware simulator makes firmware, operating system and application designer's task easy and simple by providing debugging and code coverage features. It can also be used for system level verification and validation to improve product quality.