An Ultrasynchronization Checking Method With Trace-Driven Simulation for Fast and Accurate MPSoC Virtual Platform Simulation

Efficiency and accuracy are two critical concerns in multiprocessor system on chip (MPSoC) virtual platform simulation. Traditional simulation approaches that achieve high efficiency usually sacrifice accuracy. On the other hand, the cycle-accurate simulation algorithms are generally slow in speed. In this paper, we propose an ultrasynchronization checking method with an efficient trace-driven simulation mechanism that can not only improve simulation speed, but also maintain simulation accuracy. We build a SystemC-based MPSoC virtual platform to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. The experimental results show that our proposed simulation scheme can improve simulation speed up to $156\times$ over the traditional clock-step simulation method. Furthermore, our proposed method can also guarantee the cycle-accurate simulation result.