Fast Virtual Prototyping for Embedded Computing Systems Design and Exploration

Amir Charif (1, 2) , Gabriel Busnot (1, 2, 3, 4) , Rania Mameesh (2, 3) , Tanguy Sassolas (1, 2) , Nicolas Ventroux (1, 2)

1 LIST (CEA) - Laboratoire d'Intégration des Systèmes et des Technologies
2 CEA - Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives
3 LIP - Laboratoire de l'Informatique du Parallélisme
4 CASH - CASH - Compilation and Analysis, Software and Hardware

Virtual Prototyping has been widely adopted as a cost-effective solution for early hardware and software co-validation. However, as systems grow in complexity and scale, both the time required to get to a correct virtual prototype, and the time required to run real software on it can quickly become unmanageable. This paper introduces a feature-rich integrated virtual prototyping solution, designed to meet industrial needs not only in terms of performance, but also in terms of ease, rapidity and automation of modelling and exploration. It introduces novel methods to leverage the QEMU dynamic binary translator and the abstraction levels offered by SystemC/TLM 2.0 to provide the best possible trade-offs between accuracy and performance at all steps of the design. The solution also ships with a dynamic platform composition infrastructure that makes it possible to model and explore a myriad of architectures using a compact high-level description. Results obtained simulating a RISC-V SMP architecture running the PARSEC benchmark suite reveal that simulation speed can range from 30 MIPS in accurate simulation mode to 220 MIPS in fast functional validation mode.

Domaines: Modélisation et simulation; Architectures Matérielles [cs.AR]

Amir Charif, Gabriel Busnot, Rania Mameesh, Tanguy Sassolas, Nicolas Ventroux. Fast Virtual Prototyping for Embedded Computing Systems Design and Exploration. RAPIDO2019 - 11th Workshop on Rapid Simulation and Performance Evaluation: Methods and Tools, Jan 2019, Valence, Spain. pp.1-8, ⟨10.1145/3300189.3300192⟩. ⟨hal-02023805⟩