MC-Sim: an efficient simulation tool for MPSoC designs

The ability to integrate diverse components such as processor cores, memories, custom hardware blocks and complex network-on-chip (NoC) communication frameworks onto a single chip has greatly increased the design space available for system-on-chip (SoC) designers. Efficient and accurate performance estimation tools are needed to assist the designer in making design decisions. In this paper, we present MC-Sim, a heterogeneous multi-core simulator framework which is capable of accurately simulating a variety of processor, memory, NoC configurations and application specific coprocessors. We also describe a methodology to automatically generate fast, cycletrue behavioral, C-based simulators for coprocessors using a high-level synthesis tool and integrate them with MC-Sim, thus augmenting it with the capacity to simulate coprocessors. Our Cbased simulators provide on an average 45x improvement in simulation speed over that of RTL descriptions. We have used this framework to simulate a numb...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICCAD
• Authors: Jason Cong, Karthik Gururaj, Guoling Han, Adam Kaplan, Mishali Naik, Glenn Reinman
• Keywords: Accurate Performance Estimation, Hardware, ICCAD 2008, Interesting Design Implementations, Multi-core Simulator Framework