Fast and Accurate Cosimulation of MPSoC Using Trace-Driven Virtual Synchronization

As MPSoC has become an effective solution to ever-increasing design complexity of modern embedded systems, fast and accurate cosimulation of such systems is becoming a tough challenge. Cosimulation performance is in inverse proportion to the number of processor simulators in conventional cosimulation frameworks with lock-step synchronization schemes. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel time synchronization technique called trace-driven virtual synchronization. Having separate phases of event generation and event alignment in the cosimulation, time synchronization overhead is reduced to almost zero, boosting cosimulation speed while accuracy is almost preserved. In addition, this technique enables (1) a fast mixed level cosimulation where different abstraction level simulators are easily integrated communicating with traces and (2) a distributed parallel cosimulation where each simulator can run at its full speed without synchronizing with other simulator too frequently. We compared the performance and the accuracy with MaxSim, a well-known commercial System C simulation framework, and the proposed framework showed 11 times faster performance for H.263 decoder example, while the error was below 5%.