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Enhancing Performance of HW/SW Cosimulation and Coemulation by Reducing Communication Overhead

Published: 01 February 2006 Publication History

Abstract

For system-level simulation of a complex system-on-chip design, multiple hardware simulators and emulators can be combined to work together. The simulation performance in this case is often limited by the communication overhead between simulators and emulators. To reduce the amount of communication in this heterogeneous simulation environment, we propose novel methods to find a time interval during which there are no transactions among simulators based on a dynamic prediction of transaction occurrence time for both software and hardware models. We also propose a simulator scheduling algorithm which allows the simulator to work alone without interaction with others when there is no transaction. By so doing, we reduced the amount of pure communication by a factor of 15 to 67 and, as a result, achieved a speed-up factor of 4 to 40 compared to existing lock-step simulation, as shown by experimental results with various application examples.

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Cited By

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  • (2012)Network-aware design-space exploration of a power-efficient embedded applicationProceedings of the eighth IEEE/ACM/IFIP international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis10.1145/2380445.2380531(567-574)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2012
  • (2011)Simulation environment configuration for parallel simulation of multicore embedded systemsProceedings of the 48th Design Automation Conference10.1145/2024724.2024808(345-350)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2011
  • (2009)Scalable and retargetable simulation techniquesfor multiprocessor systemsProceedings of the 7th IEEE/ACM international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis10.1145/1629435.1629448(89-98)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2009
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Published In

cover image IEEE Transactions on Computers
IEEE Transactions on Computers  Volume 55, Issue 2
February 2006
143 pages

Publisher

IEEE Computer Society

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 February 2006

Author Tags

  1. Index Terms- Simulation performance
  2. coemulation
  3. cosimulation
  4. heterogeneous simulation environment.
  5. system-level verification

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View all
  • (2012)Network-aware design-space exploration of a power-efficient embedded applicationProceedings of the eighth IEEE/ACM/IFIP international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis10.1145/2380445.2380531(567-574)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2012
  • (2011)Simulation environment configuration for parallel simulation of multicore embedded systemsProceedings of the 48th Design Automation Conference10.1145/2024724.2024808(345-350)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2011
  • (2009)Scalable and retargetable simulation techniquesfor multiprocessor systemsProceedings of the 7th IEEE/ACM international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis10.1145/1629435.1629448(89-98)Online publication date: 11-Oct-2009
  • (2007)Power efficient co-simulation framework for a wireless application using platform based SoCProceedings of the 7th international conference on Embedded computer systems: architectures, modeling, and simulation10.5555/1776200.1776248(365-374)Online publication date: 16-Jul-2007
  • (2007)Fast cycle-approximate MPSoC simulation based on synchronization time-point predictionDesign Automation for Embedded Systems10.1007/s10617-007-9010-y11:4(223-247)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2007

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