A Simulation and Exploration Technology for Multimedia-Application-Driven Architectures

  • Authors:

  • Ivano Barbieri;Massimo Bariani;Alberto Cabitto;Marco Raggio

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Biophysical and Electronic Engineering, University of Genova, Genova, Italy 16146;Department of Biophysical and Electronic Engineering, University of Genova, Genova, Italy 16146;Department of Biophysical and Electronic Engineering, University of Genova, Genova, Italy 16146;Department of Biophysical and Electronic Engineering, University of Genova, Genova, Italy 16146

  • Venue:
  • Journal of VLSI Signal Processing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

The increasing of computational power requirements for DSP and Multimedia application and the needs of easy-to-program development environment has driven recent programmable devices toward Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) [1] architectures and Hw-Sw co-design environments [2]. VLIW architecture allows generating optimized machine code from high-level languages exploiting Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) [3]. Furthermore, applications requirements and time to market constraints are growing dramatically moving functionalities toward System on Chip (SoC) direction. This paper presents VLIW-SIM, an Application-Driven Architecture-design approach based on Instruction Set simulation. VLIW architectures and Instruction Set simulation were chosen to fulfill multimedia domain requirements and to implement an efficient Hw-Sw co-design environment. The VLIW-SIM simulation technology is based on pipeline status modeling, Simulation cache and Simulation Oriented Hw description. An effective support for Hw-Sw co-design requires high simulation performance (in terms of Simulated Instruction per Second--SIPS), flexibility (the ability to represent a number of different architectures) and cycle accuracy. There is a strong trade-off between these features: cycle accurate or close to cycle accurate simulation have usually low performance [4, 5]. Good simulation performance can be obtained loosing the simulator flexibility. Moreover SoC simulation requires a further degree of flexibility in simulating different components (core, co-processors, memories, buses). The proposed approach is focused on interpretative (not compiled [6]) re-configurable Instruction Set Simulator (ISS) in order to support both application design and architecture exploration. VLIW-SIM main features are: efficient host resource allocation, Instruction Set and Architecture description Flexibility (Instruction Set Dynamic Generation and Simulation Oriented Hardware Description), Step by step pipeline status tracking, Simulation Speed and Accuracy. Performance of simulation test for three validation case studies (TI TMS320C62x, TI TMS320C64x and ST200) are reported.