Design Space Exploration Using Arithmetic-Level Hardware–Software Cosimulation for Configurable Multiprocessor Platforms

Configurable multiprocessor platforms consist of multiple soft processors configured on FPGA devices. They have become an attractive choice for implementing many computing applications. In addition to the various ways of distributing software execution among the multiple soft processors, the application designer can customize soft processors and the connections between them in order to improve the performance of the applications running on the multiprocessor platform. State-of-the-art design tools rely on low-level simulation to explore the various design trade-offs offered by configurable multiprocessor platforms. These low-level simulation based exploration techniques are too time-consuming and can be a major bottleneck to efficient design space exploration on these platforms. We propose a design space exploration technique for configurable multiprocessor platforms using arithmetic-level cycle-accurate hardware–software cosimulation. Arithmetic-level abstractions of the hardware and software execution platforms are created within the proposed cosimulation environment. The configurable multiprocessor platforms are described using these arithmetic-level abstractions. Hardware and software simulators are tightly integrated to concurrently simulate the arithmetic behavior of the multiprocessor platform. The simulation within the integrated simulators are synchronized to provide cycle-accurate simulation result