Development of high performance space processor emulator based on QEMU — Open source dynamic translator

During the development of flight software, the processor emulator is an essential tool for software development, verification and the core component of the satellite simulator, which can be substituted for the real hardware. The on-board computer being developed by KARI uses the ERC32 processor based on SPARC v7, whereas high performance LEON2/3 processor based on SPARC v8 will be used for OBC in next-generation LEO satellite. But the processor emulator based on the instruction level interpretation cannot meet the real time performance because of the high performance of LEON2/3 processor. To resolve this problem, this paper presents the development of ERC32/LEON3 processor emulator based on QEMU which is open source and dynamic translator. And it describes the software development and testing/debugging on the developed emulator.