Ultra-Fast DMAC TLM Model for High Speed Virtual Platform Simulation

Abstract

Granularity of transactions, which are initiated by the Programmer's View (PV) models, has high impact on the simulation speed of Virtual Platforms (VP). Since PV models are intended to run at high simulation speed, hardware parameters such as data bus width should not slow-down the simulation speed of the PV-level abstracted transactions. Hardware parameters should be taken into account only to tune the Approximately-Timed (AT) models of the device. A new SystemC-TLM Direct Memory Access Controller (DMAC) model, for ARM PL080 is developed and validated. The programmed transfers are performed with coarse granularity for read/write transactions. QEMU-based and SystemC-TLM-based platforms are also implemented to determine the effect of the granularity of the transactions on the PV simulation speed. The developed model is compared with the existing ARM Fast Model and the open-source QEMU model. Up to 100x reduction in simulation time is achieved with the developed model.