System-level verification and testing of a safety-critical SoC using HW/SW Co-Simulation

At the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) different sources produce ionizing radiation. This radiation needs to be monitored to protect people and the environment from effects caused by high exposure. The CERN Radiation Monitoring Electronics (CROME) are developed for this application and use a heterogeneous System- on-Chip (SoC), a Zynq-7000, as its main computing device. An approach for performing system-level verification on such an SoC is shown within this thesis, which is built on a Hardware/Software Co-simulation. The simulator is created by connecting an off-the-shelf hardware simulator and QEMU, a full machine (software) emulator. Its speed is high enough to boot Linux in minutes while keeping the model close enough to real-life to enable verification. A constrained random stimulus testbench architecture, based on industry-standard Universal Verification Methodology (UVM), for interfacing both software and hardware is developed within this work. CROME features interfaces similar to Internet of Things (IoT) devices: software interacts via TCP/IP and hardware connects various sensors. The presented topology is therefore suitable for a range of other hardware as well.