A method for accelerating hardware simulation is presented wherein cycle based
simulations of digital system designs are generated by raising the level of abstraction
in a hardware simulation environment. Behavioral models of the digital system components
are created in a high level general purpose programming language. Function calls
created in a high level general purpose programming language provide a transaction
based communication interface. During a simulation of the system design, the behavioral
models communicate with each other through the transaction based communication
interface. Additionally, the behavioral models employ an execute and update method
of instruction processing that generates cycle accurate information for the simulation.