Parallel SystemC simulation for ESL design using flexible time decoupling
Jan Henrik Weinstock, Rainer Leupers, Gerd Ascheid · 2015
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.