A Fast Timing-Accurate MPSoC HW/SW Co-Simulation Platform based on a Novel Synchronization Scheme

Fast and accurate full-system simulation is needed for MPSoC design space exploration to achieve tight time-to-market design goals. In the field of full-system simulation, transaction level modeling with SystemC and traditional instruction set simulators (e.g. M5) based on C/C++ have their own advantages, separately. In this paper, a novel method for synchronizing M5 and SystemC modules is proposed to achieve fast and timing-accurate co-simulation. This method adopts event-driven scheduling and object-oriented programming technology. With this method, an MPSoC full-system co-simulation platform, which allows modeling the architecture at multiple levels of abstraction, is presented. The fast abstract model of M5 and timing-accurate model of SystemC has been used for hardware framework. On the other hand, a lightweight MPI library is implemented for communication of software applications. The simulation result shows that the novel scheme can obtain a fast simulation speed with no expense on simulation precision. Additionally a parallel MUSIC algorithm is designed which evaluates the validation of the MPSoC platform.