Exploiting binary translation for fast ASIP design space exploration on FPGAs

Complex Application Specific Instruction-set Processors (ASIPs) expose to the designer a large number of degrees of freedom, posing the need for highly accurate and rapid simulation environments. FPGA-based emulators represent an alternative to software cycle-accurate simulators, preserving maximum accuracy and reasonable simulation times. The work presented in this paper aims at exploiting FPGA emulation within technology aware design space exploration of ASIPs. The potential speedup provided by reconfigurable logic is reduced by the overhead of RTL synthesis/implementation. This overhead can be mitigated by reducing the number of FPGA implementation processes, through the adoption of binary-level translation. Hereby we present a prototyping method that, given a set of candidate ASIP configurations, defines an overdimensioned ASIP architecture, capable of emulating all the design space points under evaluation. This approach is then evaluated with a design space exploration case study. Along with execution time, by coupling FPGA emulation with activity-based physical modeling, we can extract area/power/energy figures.