Speeding Up MPSoC virtual platform simulation by Ultra Synchronization Checking Method

Virtual platform simulation is an essential technique for early-stage system-level design space exploration and embedded software development. In order to explore the hardware behavior and verify the embedded software, simulation speed and accuracy are the two most critical factors. However, given the increasing complexity of the Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) designs, even the state-of-the-art virtual platform simulation algorithms may suffer from the simulation speed issue. In this paper, we proposed an Ultra Synchronization Checking Method (USCM) for fast and robust virtual platform simulation. We devise a data dependency table (DDT) so that the memory access information by the hardware modules and software programs can be predicted and checked. By reducing the unnecessary synchronizations among simulation modules and utilizing the asynchronous discrete event simulation technique, we can significantly improve the virtual platform simulation speed. Our experimental results show that the proposed USCM can simulate a 32-processor SoC design in the speed of multimillion instructions per second. We also demonstrate that our method is less sensitive to the number of cores in the virtual platform simulation.