flipSyrup: Cycle-accurate hardware simulation framework on abstract FPGA platforms

Abstract

FPGA-based rapid prototyping is widely applied for fast simulations of hardware structure verifications. In this paper, we propose flipSyrup, a prototyping framework for cycle-accurate hardware simulations on abstract FPGA platforms. In order to mitigate the development complexity of FPGA-based simulators, the framework provides two abstractions of resources on FPGA platforms: Memory systems and inter-FPGA interconnections on multi-FPGA platforms. The framework enables designers to draw up a target hardware using abstract interfaces as ideal memory systems and interconnections on FPGA platforms. Our evaluation result shows that the slowdowns in simulation speed under the abstractions by using the framework are not critical.