Virtual prototyping of floating point units
Guillaume Sarrazin, Nicolas Brunie, Frédéric Pétrot · 2016
Virtual prototyping is a key technology for design space exploration, design verification, code development and testing of new systems on chip. For processors, either general purpose, multi and manycore or GPUs, the availability of powerful floating point units has now become mandatory in a lot of markets. However, implementing a fast and accurate floating point unit virtual prototype is not easy, even if host and target processors are IEEE 754 compliant. The goal of this paper is not to propose a definitive solution to this problem, but to draw the attention of the virtual prototyping community to it. To that aim, we study two solutions that form a compromise between speed of virtual prototype execution and computation accuracy.