Abstract:

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, cycle-true 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 C-based simulators provide on an average 45x improvement in simulation speed over that of RTL descriptions. We have used this framework to simulate a number of real-life applications such as the MPEG4 decoder and litho-simulation, and experimented with a number of design choices. Our simulator framework is able to accurately model the performance of these applications (only 7% off the actual implementation) and allows us to explore the design space rapidly and achieve interesting design implementations.

Published:

"MC-Sim: an efficient simulation tool for MPSoC designs"
Jason Cong, Karthik Gururaj, Guoling Han, Adam Kaplan, Mishali Naik, and Glenn Reinman.
Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD'08) , San Jose, CA, November 2008.

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Paper:

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BibTeX Entry:

@inproceedings{1509541,
 author = {Cong, Jason and Gururaj, Karthik and Han, Guoling and Kaplan, Adam and Naik, Mishali and Reinman, Glenn},
 title = {MC-Sim: an efficient simulation tool for MPSoC designs},
 booktitle = {ICCAD '08: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design},
 year = {2008},
 isbn = {978-1-4244-2820-5},
 pages = {364--371},
 location = {San Jose, California},
 publisher = {IEEE Press},
 address = {Piscataway, NJ, USA},
 }