Parallel SystemC simulation for ESL design using flexible time decoupling

Abstract

Engineers of next generation embedded systems heavily rely on virtual platforms as central tools in their design process. Yet, the ever increasing HW/SW complexity degrades the simulation performance of those platforms and threatens their viability as design tools. With multi-core workstations today being widely available, the transition towards parallel simulation technologies seems obvious. Recently published parallel SystemC simulators use time-decoupling to achieve high simulation performance on modern SMP machines. However, those simulators have to identify all cross-thread communication ahead of time. This work presents an approach how to overcome this limitation and to enable time-decoupled simulation for mainstream SystemC simulators, achieving a speedup of up to 3.4× on a quad-core host.