Unified approach for Performance Evaluation and Debug of System on Chip at early design phase

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel approach for System Level Debug and Performance Evaluation that exploits the signal level and clock cycle accuracy existing in Bus Cycle Accurate hardware IP models along with the advantages of untimed Transaction Level Modeling. The developed toolset can be integrated in SoC simulations in a nonintrusive manner which secretly embeds performance figures and debug information in dumped simulation database at signal and transaction level. Proposed approach suggests modeling the SoC components with only functional accuracy in which the computational delays are added using the timing features provided by event based SystemC kernel. The components are modeled with clock cycle and signal level accuracy at the interface. Profiling results shows that the proposed approach outperforms several state-of-art methodologies in terms accuracy, adaptability and simulation speed by an order of magnitude of 102. The developed toolset can effectively be used in a co-simulation environment with IPs at different abstraction levels.