Handling dynamic frequency changes in statically scheduled cycle-accurate simulation

Abstract

ISBN 978-1-4244-7515-5International audienceAlthough high level simulation models are being increasingly used for digital electronic system validation, cycle accuracy is still required in some cases, such as hardware protocol validation or accurate power/energy estimation. Cycle-accurate simulation is however slow and acceleration approaches make the assumption of a single constant clock, which is not true anymore with the generalization of dynamic voltage and frequency scaling techniques. Fast cycle-accurate simulators supporting several clocks whose frequencies can change at run time are thus needed. This paper presents two algorithms we designed for this purpose and details their properties and implementations

Effectiveness of power strategies for video applications: a practical study

“…The platforms used for experiments combines a real Platform Baseboard ARM 1176JZF-S development board including builtin resources for power monitoring, and two QEMU based virtual platforms including models of previous ARM1176JZF-S and for the Cortex A9 based ST-Ericsson Nova A9500 application processor. As QEMU platforms provides SystemC cycle acurate MPSoC simulations supporting power / energy management and estimation [22] [23], they were used profitably in the absence of equivalent real platforms at the start of this work. In the following, we investigate these strategies using both a functional H.264 decoder for the ARM11 based Platform Baseboard and a task model of an H.264 encoder on virtual platforms, to be able to process QEMU based simulations.…”