Simulator and simulation method

1. A simulator comprising:

a hardware section that includes a peripheral hardware configuration with a structure required for a central processing unit and an operating system to operate alone;

a software section that simulates the operation of peripheral hardware, other than hardware constituting the hardware section, as a peripheral hardware model; and

an interface board that connects the hardware section and software section,

wherein the interface board includes a register that acts as at least one of: an interruption event generation register that notifies the peripheral hardware model of generation of an interruption when an access is made to an address within a predetermined address range, or an interruption/wait event generating register that notifies the peripheral hardware model of generation of an interruption and puts the hardware section in a wait state until an instruction of the release of the wait state is issued from the peripheral hardware model.

2. The simulator according to claim 1 , wherein the interface board is connected to the software section via at least one of a Peripheral Component Interconnect board or a bus.

3. The simulator according to claim 1 , wherein the interface board is connected via a bus to the hardware section.

4. The simulator according to claim 1 , wherein the peripheral hardware configuration of the hardware section is reuseable for verifying plural target products with common hardware configuration.

5. The simulator of claim 1 , wherein the software section includes a configuration file for applying image compression to a set of image data.

6. The simulator of claim 1 , wherein the software section includes a device driver that controls input/output data of all simulated hardware and operation of the interface board.

7. A simulation method, comprising:

obtaining profile data, transfer source address data, and transfer destination address data from a hardware section, obtaining a signal from the hardware section to start a simulation via a peripheral hardware model included in a software section;

obtaining confirmation from the peripheral hardware model of the signal to start the simulation and transferring the profile data, transfer source address data, and transfer destination address data to the peripheral hardware model;

loading data from a memory of the hardware section to a memory of the software section;

obtaining an operation status value from the peripheral hardware model; and

processing simulation data from the peripheral hardware model via a transmitting/receiving buffer into the memory of the hardware section upon completion of the simulation.

8. The method of claim 7 , wherein the operation status value indicates at least one of a processing state, a conversion error, or whether processing of the simulation data is to be synchronized with the hardware section.

9. The method of claim 7 , further comprising loading configuration file data into a control section, wherein the configuration file data includes a function assignment of at least one of a profile data register, a transfer source address/size register, a transfer destination address/size register, a control register, or an operation status register.

10. The method of claim 7 , further comprising writing to a register that acts as at least one of: an interruption event generation register that notifies the peripheral hardware model of generation of an interruption when an access is made to an address within a predetermined address range, or an interruption/wait event generating register that notifies the peripheral hardware model of generation of an interruption and puts the hardware section in a wait state until an instruction of the release of the wait state is issued from the peripheral hardware model.

11. The method of claim 7 , wherein the simulation includes performing image compression on uncompressed image data loaded from the memory of the hardware section.