Towards a heterogeneous simulation kernel for system level models: a SystemC kernel for synchronous data flow models

ABSTRACT

As SystemC gains popularity as a modeling language of choice for system-on-chip (SOC) designs, heterogeneous modeling in SystemC and efficient simulation become increasingly important. However, in the current reference implementation, all SystemC models are simulated through a non-deterministic Discrete-Event simulation kernel, which schedules events at run-time. This sometimes results in too many delta cycles hindering the simulation performance of the model. The SystemC language also seems to target this simulation kernel as the target simulation engine. This makes it difficult to express different Models Of Computation naturally in SystemC. In an SOC model, different components may need to be naturally expressible in different Models Of Computations. Some of these components may be amenable to static scheduling based simulation or other pre-simulation optimization techniques. Our goal is to create a simulation framework for heterogeneous SystemC models, to gain efficiency and ease of use within the framework of SystemC reference implementation. In this paper, we focus on Synchronous Data Flow (SDF) models, where the rates of data produced and consumed by a data flow node/block are known a priori. In digital signal processing (DSP) applications where relative sample rates are specified for each DSP component, such models are quite common. Compile time knowledge of these rates allow the use of static scheduling resulting in significant improvement in simulation efficiency. We describe an alternate SystemC kernel that exploits such static scheduling of SDF models. Our experiments show improvement in simulation time over the original models and over the latest efficiency results from [20].

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.6 SIMULATION AND MODELING
      I.6.2 Simulation Languages

General Terms:
Algorithms, Design, Experimentation, Verification

Keywords:
SystemC, embedded system design, heterogeneous, models of computation, simulation efficiency, synchronous data flow