AcENoCs: A Configurable HW/SW Platform for FPGA Accelerated NoC Emulation

The heterogeneous nature of the modern day applications has resulted in widespread use of Multicore SoC architectures. The emerging Network-On-Chip (NoC) interconnect architecture provides an energy-efficient and scalable communication solution for multiple cores, serving as a powerful replacement for traditional bus architectures. The key to the successful realization of such architectures is a flexible, fast and robust emulation platform. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of AcENoCs, a flexible and cycle-accurate FPGA emulation platform for validating synchronous and GALS-based NoC architectures. The emulation platform is built around a HWSW framework consisting of reconfigurable network components, traffic generators and ejectors, statistics collection and analysis modules. We also address the unique features of our platform in terms of reconfigurability and co-design of the hardware and software components, and assess the performance improvements and tradeoffs over existing PGA emulators and software simulators. Our experimental analysis indicate speedup improvements in the order of 10000-12000X over HDL simulators and 14-47X over software simulators, without sacrificing cycle accuracy.