Hybrid Prototyping of multicore embedded systems

Abstract

This paper presents a novel modeling technique for multicore embedded systems, called Hybrid Prototyping. The fundamental idea is to simulate a design with multiple cores by creating an emulation kernel in software on top of a single physical instance of the core. The emulation kernel switches between tasks mapped to different cores and manages the logical simulation times of the individual cores. As a result, we can achieve fast and cycle-accurate simulation of symmetric multicore designs, thereby overcoming the accuracy concerns of virtual prototyping and the scalability issues of physical prototyping. Our experiments with industrial multicore designs show that the simulation time with hybrid prototyping grows only linearly with the number of cores and the inter-core communication traffic, while providing 100% cycle accuracy.