Method to Process Instruction Requests for a Digital Hardware Simulator and Instruction Request Broker

摘要

The present invention relates to the processing of hardware simulator instruction requests. A request broker is processing high-level simulator instruction requests submitted by different drivers. A high-level instruction request comprises multiple simulator instructions. The request broker is receiving and splitting the requests into simulator instructions. The instructions are put in a request queue associated to the driver originating the request. The request broker is then processing the request queues in a round-robin fashion and submits the instructions in a queue to the simulator until a clock instruction needs to be submitted. Then the next queue is processed. When only clock instructions need to be submitted, the minimum number of clock cycles is determined and submitted in a new instruction to the simulator. This minimum number is then subtracted from the clock instructions in the queues, and the drivers are queried for new requests.