An Innovative Approach to Couple EDA Tools with Recon.gurable Hardware

The integration of real hardware components into simulation environments requires a suitable interface. There are a variety of simulators with unique specific vendor dependent interfaces, which are not compatible in general and some of them cannot support features that are required by modern design tools. To overcome the resulting insufficience, the Open Model Interface (OMI) was defined. This paper shows that the OMI, developed for complex digital software models, can also be used to couple hardware with simulators, whereby all advantages of the OMI (e.g. vendor independence, IP protection) are preserved.