A Tool for Structured Functional Simulation

Abstract

BLOSIM is a general purpose time-driven (as opposed to event-driven) simulation language. It is written in C language, and is intended to provide a highly structured environment for simulations, thereby making practical the accumulation of libraries of simulation routines which can be reused and making multiprogrammer simulation efforts more practical. It is written with the philosophy of not including any simulation primitives within the language itself, but rather complete generality is maintained by having the user provide these as C routines (either coded from scratch or from a user-provided library). It includes as features a hierarchical specification of blocks, interconnection of blocks by first-in first-out buffers, the passing of parameters to blocks, multiple instances of blocks, and automatic scheduling of the order of block execution. It has been used for the multiprogrammer simulation of data transmission and speech processing systems, in both academic and industrial environments, with good results.