Towards Virtual Prototyping of Synchronous Real-time Systems on NoC-based MPSoCs

NoC-based designs provide a scalable and flexible
communication solution for the rising number of processing cores
on a single chip. To master the complexity of the software design in
such a NoC-based multi-core architecture, advanced incremental
integration testing solutions are required. In this presents a virtual
platform based software testing and debugging approach for a
synchronous application model on a 2x2 NoC-based MPSoC. We
propose a development approach and a test environment that
exploits the time approximation within Imperas OVP instruction
accurate simulator and a functional model of the Nostrum NoC,
for both software instructions and hardware clock cycles at larger
time stamps called Quantums that does not sacrifice functional
correctness. The functional testing environment runs the target
software without running it on the real hardware platform. With
the help of Nostrum NoC we can support a synchronous system
execution that is reasonably fast and precise with respect to a global
synchronization signal, called HeartBeat. As work in progress, this
work also discusses several possible timing refinement and their
possible implication on the simulation semantics and performance
and how it is tackled in future work.