Accelerating hardware simulation: Testbench code emulation

Abstract

Todaypsilas verification challenges require high-performance simulation solutions, such as hardware simulation accelerators and emulators, that have been in use in hardware and electronic system design centers for approximately the last decade. In particular, in order to accelerate functional simulation, hardware emulation is used so as to offload calculation-intensive tasks from the software simulator. However, the communication overhead between the software simulator and the hardware emulator is becoming a new critical bottleneck. In our work we introduce a novel way of repartitioning the simulation between software and hardware in order to minimize this communication bottleneck. Using the techniques described in this paper we are able to offload a big part of the work that is traditionally done by the software simulator, onto the hardware emulator. Our experiments, using real-world designs, demonstrate that the proposed method reduces significantly the communication overhead and outperforms the conventional hardware emulation systems by a factor of more than 7. Finally, we provide a way of observing and modifying the internal state of the hardware emulator while the test is running.