An ultra-fast hybrid simulation framework for ASIP

Abstract

ISS (Instruction Set Simulator) plays an important role in pre-silicon software development for ASIP. However, the speed of traditional simulation is too slow to effectively support full-scale software development. In this paper, we propose a hybrid simulation framework which further improves the previous simulation methods by aggressively utilizing the host machine resources. The utilization is achieved by categorizing instructions of ASIP application into two types, namely custom and basic instructions, via binary instrumentation. Then in a way of hybrid simulation, only custom instructions are simulated on the ISS and basic instructions are executed fast and natively on the host machine. We implement this framework for an industrial ASIP to validate our approach. Experimental results show that when the implemented ISS, namely GS-Sim, is applied to practical multimedia decoders, an average simulation speed up to 1058.5MIPS can be achieved, which is 34.7 times of the state-of-art dynamic binary translation simulator and is the fastest to the best of our knowledge.