Rapid design space exploration of multi-clock domain MPSoCs with hybrid prototyping

Abstract

This paper presents novel techniques of using hybrid prototyping for early power-performance analysis of MPSoC designs with multiple clock domains. The fundamental idea of hybrid prototyping is to simulate a design with multiple cores by creating an emulation kernel in software on top of a single physical instance of the core. However, so far hybrid prototyping has been limited to homogeneous multicores running at the same clock frequency. Moreover, hybrid prototyping has not yet been demonstrated for efficient design space exploration. Our work focuses on enhancing the capabilities of hybrid prototyping, such that it can be applied to realistic multi-clock MPSoC designs as well to perform early power-performance evaluation of MPSoC designs. Our experiments using industrial strength applications such as JPEG, MP3 and Packet Processing, demonstrate the high accuracy of our hybrid prototypes, and over two orders of magnitude improvement over software simulation speed. We also demonstrate that exploring over 150 design options using hybrid prototyping can be done with high reliability in the order of minutes compared to multiple days using conventional FPGA prototyping.