Unified modeling technique using VHDL-AMS and software components

Abstract

The paper deals with the dynamic modeling of mechatronic devices, which usually need detailed modeling to be described and to take into account the physical properties of the VHDL-AMS, which is a powerful unified modeling language for mixed system, allows to describe a large range of physical systems, for their dynamic simulation. It allows to describe models of physical components and then to connect them to obtain the model of a system. However, this language cannot support the description of some physical phenomena, such local ones, defined by numerical methods (e.g.: finite element method, special numerical integrals). When an aspect of a model cannot be described in VHDL-AMS, the paper proposes to use software components. So, the aim of the paper is to propose a generic way to extend the computation capability of VHDL-AMS, by coupling the models described in VHDL-AMS with external ones specified as software components (where VHDL-AMS fails). The approach has been applied on several applications, among them the time simulation of an electrical plunger.