Parallel SystemC Cosimulation using Virtual Synchronization

This paper concerns fast and time accurate HW/SW cosimulation for MPSoC(Multi-Processor System-on-chip) architecture where multiple software and/or hardware components exist. It is becoming more and more common to use MPSoC architecture to design complex embedded systems. In cosimulation of such architecture, as the number of the component simulators participating in the cosimulation increases, the time synchronization overhead among simulators increases, thereby resulting in low overall cosimulation performance. Although SystemC cosimulation frameworks show high cosimulation performance, it is in inverse proportion to the number of simulators. In this paper, we extend the novel technique, called virtual synchronization, which boosts cosimulation speed by reducing time synchronization overhead: (1) SystemC simulation is supported seamlessly in the virtual synchronization framework without requiring the modification on SystemC kernel (2) Parallel execution of component simulators with virtual synchronization is supported. We compared the performance and accuracy of the proposed parallel SystemC cosimulation framework with MaxSim, a well-known commercial SystemC cosimulation framework, and the proposed one showed 11 times faster performance for H.263 decoder example, while the accuracy was maintained below 5%.