A Process-based Reconfigurable SystemC Module for simulation speedup

Abstract

As Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoC) architectures become more and more complex, Design Space Exploration (DSE) becomes the only viable solution for finding the pareto-optimal designs. To evaluate each solution with real dataset, DSE has to simulate the design under test, which is modeled as a Virtual Platform usually written in SystemC. However, the simulation is a very slow task which includes non-productive time periods like system initialization, while the platform re-compilation also imposes a significant overhead. In this paper, a Process-based Reconfigurable Module is used in order to bypass the non-productive simulation parts, thus accelerating the simulation. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is proved with a series of computationally intensive multimedia applications, where the simulation time improvements reach 34% on average.