SoCRocket - A virtual platform for the European Space Agency's SoC development

SoCRocket is a design framework for rapid SoC development. Emerged from an industrial case study for the European Space Agency (ESA) it enables design, verification and evaluation of multiprocessor platforms based on a collection of open and freely available building blocks, including the LEON processor and the RTEMS operating system. Moreover, it provides a modular and standard-compliant tool-set for the creation, configuration, simulation, and performance analysis of virtual platform prototypes, supporting mixed abstraction levels to balance simulation accuracy and speed. Based on state-of-the-art design specification languages such as SystemC/TLM2 all modules are available in three abstraction levels: loosely-timed (LT), approximately-timed (AT) and register-transfer-level (RTL). Hence, mixed-abstraction simulations and timing variants can be created quickly depending on the required use case. We apply SoCRocket to a proof-of-concept system, which is optimized for the lossless multi- & hyperspectral compression of satellite images in terms of number of cores and cache configurations, demonstrating the platform's capabilities for design-space exploration. The accuracy of the higher abstraction models is within a 90% range compared to RTL, while the simulation speedup reaches 1500X for our benchmarks.