TALON-DX Simulation Environment Design

The TALON-DX signal processing board is an expensive piece of equipment and it is likely that the number of prototype boards available during the bridging period and early construction will make the availability of TALON-DX boards a critical component in the development schedule.  Since the HPS on the TALON-DX runs Linux, it is possible to do the bulk of software development and testing using a generic Linux server rather than a TALON-DX board.

The key component required to make this an effective approach for testing M&C software is to be able to simulate the behavior of firmware IP blocks (from a M&C point of view) on a standard Linux server.

The basis of the solution is to use a test version of the libip to direct register access commands to a simulator, which will use scripts to model IP block behavior to populate status registers and respond to changes in control registers.

This feature is to define the high level design for the simulation environment and contains the following tasks.

1. Determine simulation environment requirements
2. Write and review high level design document
3. Sent the 1st draft of the documents for review.
4. Update the document as per review comments.