Jack Peng and Jimmy Zhang
The objective of this project is to prototype a component-based behavior simulation system using Java programming language. As the fundamental element of such a simulation system, a component is formed by the encapsulation of the behavior along with the structural description of a functional block within a digital system. The complete simulation process can be characterized as the activities of many different components with every individual self-describing the behavior subject to external input and initial condition and interchanging input and output with each other. We believe this type of simulation system is a more adaptive, more scalable, and more efficient way of performing behavior simulation for digital systems with various complexities at all abstraction levels.
In this project we implemented a still primitive scheme of doing component base simulation. In this scheme one can define not only base level components but also higher level components by wrapping base level components and/or other high level components tougher, with a scheduler to coordinate their operation and move data among hem. Simulation is done with a user defined thread that interacts with the highest level component, which is the design. We are able wrap several simple components into one higher level component and wrap these higher level one's into even higher one's and simulate them while getting the expected results.
Even though we have components that simulate themselves independent of other components, this scheme is not yet able to coordinate simulations where components are distribute because our schedulers are still local coordinators. To make the simulator able to simulate over the network, we need to have a scheduling protocol.