A Trace-driven Hardware-level Simulator for Design and Verification of Network-on-Chips

• Traditional communications of general-purpose multi-core processor and application-specific System-on-Chip face challenges in terms of scalability and complexity. Network-on-Chip (NoC) has been the most promising solution for the communications of multi-core and many-core chips. In this paper, we present a trace-driven hardware-level simulator (noted HS) based on SystemVerilog for the design and verification of NoCs. Different from the state-of-the-art NoC simulators, the HS owns three important characteristics in addition to the capability of creating simulation and synthesizable NoC descriptions: 1) hardware-level simulation can be done, which means more implementation details of hardware than flit-level simulation; 2) router debugging and verification can be done at RTL by inserting assertions and coverage; 3) trace-based application simulations can be done besides synthetic workloads. A 4 X 4 2D mesh NoC with output virtual-channel routers verifies the capability of our HS.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datorteknik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Engineering (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Network-on-Chips

Hardware-level Simulation

SystemVerilog

Verification

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)