VirtualSoC: A Full-System Simulation Environment for Massively Parallel Heterogeneous System-on-Chip

Daniele Bortolotti, Christian Pinto, Andrea Marongiu, Martino Ruggiero, Luca Benini

Abstract: Driven by flexibility, performance and cost constraints of demanding modern applications, heterogeneous System-on-Chip (SoC) is the dominant design paradigm in the embedded system computing domain. SoC architecture and heterogeneity clearly provide a wider power/performance scaling, combining high performance and power efficient general-purpose cores along with massively parallel many-core-based accelerators. Besides the complex hardware, generally these kinds of platforms host also an advanced software ecosystem, composed by an operating system, several communication protocol stacks, and various computational demanding user applications. The necessity to efficiently cope with the hugeHW/SW design space provided by this scenario makes clearly full-system simulator one of the most important design tools. We present in this paper a new emulation framework, called Virtual SoC, targeting the full-system simulation of massively parallel heterogeneous SoCs.