Speeding up SoC virtual platform simulation by data-dependency aware virtual synchronization

This paper presents a novel simulation technique for SoC virtual platforms at transaction level to achieve million-instructions-per-second (MIPS) level of simulation speed, while retaining accurate and detailed cycle information for system explorations. We first apply virtual synchronization concept to our simulation algorithm and then apply a novel data-dependency aware concept to determine precise synchronization points in simulation. Our experimental result shows that comparing to the traditional cycle-accurate TLM simulation, our approach is about 44 times faster with the simulation speed around 3.66 MPIS.