Hardware Simulation and Protocol Implementation Questions

Building software models and test harnesses that emulate hardware behavior and implementing robust communication protocol drivers. Topics include creating unit level hardware mocks, instruction set or cycle accurate simulation, co simulation with hardware description language models, and reproducible test benches for timing sensitive code. Protocol implementation covers framing, byte and bit level timing, error detection and correction such as checksums and cyclic redundancy checks, bus arbitration and collision handling, clock stretching, and retry and timeout strategies. Focus on handling edge cases such as partial transfers, bus contention, jitter, and unexpected resets by modeling timing and validating with hardware in the loop. Also covers driver layering, abstractions for testability, conformance and fuzz testing, and integrating simulation into verification and regression pipelines.