Harmless, a hardware architecture description language dedicated to real-time embedded system simulation

Validation and verification of embedded systems through simulation can be conducted at many levels, from the simulation of a high-level application model to the simulation of the actual binary code using an accurate model of the processor. However, for real-time applications, the simulated execution time must be as close as possible to the execution time on the actual platform and in this case the latter gives the closest results. The main drawback of the simulation of application’s software using an accurate model of the processor resides in the development of a handwritten simulator which is a difficult and tedious task. This paper presents Harmless, a hardware architecture description language (ADL) that mainly targets real-time embedded systems. Harmless is dedicated to the generation of simulators for hardware platforms to develop and test real-time embedded applications. Compared to existing ADLs, Harmless (1) offers a more flexible description of the instruction set architecture (ISA) (2) allows to describe the microarchitecture independently of the ISA to ease its reuse and (3) compares favorably to simulators generated by the existing ADLs toolsets.