Guo-Fu Tseng

Bio: Guo-Fu Tseng is an academic researcher from National Sun Yat-sen University. The author has contributed to research in topics: System on a chip & SystemC. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 2 publications receiving 77 citations.

A QEMU and SystemC-Based Cycle-Accurate ISS for Performance Estimation on SoC Development

Abstract: In this paper, we present a fast cycle-accurate instruction set simulator (CA-ISS) for system-on-chip development based on QEMU and SystemC. Even though most state-of-the-art commercial tools have tried very hard to provide all the levels of details to satisfy the different requirements of the software designer, the hardware designer, and even the system architect, the hardware/software co-simulation speed is dramatically slow when co-simulating the hardware models at the register-transfer level (RTL) with a full-fledged operating system (OS). Our experimental results show that the combination of QEMU and SystemC can make the co-simulation at the CA level much faster than the conventional RTL simulation, even with a full-fledged operating system up and running. Furthermore, the statistics indicate that with every instruction executed and every memory accessed since power-on traced at the CA level, it takes 28m15.804s on average to boot up a full-fledged Linux kernel, even on a personal computer. Compared to the kernel boot time reported by Xilinx and SiCortex, the proposed CA-ISS is about 6.09 times faster compared to “SystemC without trace” of Xilinx and about 30.32 times faster compared to “SystemC models converted from RTL” of SiCortex. The main contributions of this paper are threefold: 1) a hardware/software co-simulation environment capable of running a full-fledged OS at the early stage of the electronic system level design flow at an acceptable simulation speed is proposed; 2) a virtual platform constructed using the proposed CA-ISS as the processor model can be used to estimate the performance of a target system from system perspective, which all the previous works, such as QEMU-SystemC, do not provide; and 3) such a virtual platform also provides the modeling capability from the transaction level down to the CA level or the other way around.

A fast cycle-accurate instruction set simulator based on QEMU and SystemC for SoC development

Abstract: This paper presents a fast cycle-accurate instruction set simulator (CA-ISS) based on QEMU and SystemC. The CA-ISS can be used for design space exploration and as the processor core for virtual platform construction at the cycle-accurate level. Even though most state-of-the-art commercial tools try to provide all the levels of details to satisfy the different requirements of the software designer, the hardware designer, or even the system architect, the hardware/software co-simulation speed is dramatically slow when co-simulating the hardware models at the register-transfer level with a full-fledged operating system. In this paper, we show that the combination of QEMU and SystemC can make the co-simulation at the cycle-accurate level extremely fast, even with a full-fledged operating system up and running. Our experimental results indicate that with every instruction executed and every memory accessed since power-on traced at the cycle-accurate level, it takes less than 17 minutes on average to boot up a full-fledged Linux kernel, even on a laptop.

Comprehensive Abstraction of VHDL RTL Cores to ESL SystemC

Abstract: ..................................................................................................... 90 KOKKUVÕTE .................................................................................................. 92 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................... 94 Appendix A ........................................................................................................ 95 Appendix B ...................................................................................................... 103 Appendix C ...................................................................................................... 109 Appendix D ...................................................................................................... 117 Appendix E ...................................................................................................... 125 Appendix F ...................................................................................................... 133

Fast cycle estimation methodology for instruction-level emulator

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a cycle estimation methodology for fast instruction-level CPU emulators. This methodology suggests achieving accurate software performance estimation at high emulation speed by utilizing a two-phase pipeline scheduling process: a static pipeline scheduling phase performed off-line before runtime, followed by an accuracy refinement phase performed at runtime. The first phase delivers a pre-estimated CPU cycle count while limiting impact on the emulation speed. The second phase refines the pre-estimated cycle count to provide further accuracy. We implemented this methodology on Qemu and compared cycle counts with a physical ARM CPU. Our results show the efficiency of the trade-offs between emulation speed and cycle accuracy: cycle simulation error averages 10% while the emulation latency is 3.37 times that of original Qemu.

Fast Virtual Prototyping for Embedded Computing Systems Design and Exploration

Abstract: Virtual Prototyping has been widely adopted as a cost-effective solution for early hardware and software co-validation. However, as systems grow in complexity and scale, both the time required to get to a correct virtual prototype, and the time required to run real software on it can quickly become unmanageable. This paper introduces a feature-rich integrated virtual prototyping solution, designed to meet industrial needs not only in terms of performance, but also in terms of ease, rapidity and automation of modelling and exploration. It introduces novel methods to leverage the QEMU dynamic binary translator and the abstraction levels offered by SystemC/TLM 2.0 to provide the best possible trade-offs between accuracy and performance at all steps of the design. The solution also ships with a dynamic platform composition infrastructure that makes it possible to model and explore a myriad of architectures using a compact high-level description. Results obtained simulating a RISC-V SMP architecture running the PARSEC benchmark suite reveal that simulation speed can range from 30 MIPS in accurate simulation mode to 220 MIPS in fast functional validation mode.

Model-Driven Design of Network Aspects of Distributed Embedded Systems

Abstract: Design of distributed embedded systems is a challenging task and it requires raising the level of abstraction to overcome the complexity of the design. In particular, modeling languages and semantic specification are necessary to address network description at high level of abstraction. Starting from this abstraction view, model manipulation is needed to explore various design alternatives and code generation is required for their simulation. In this paper, we propose the use of unified modeling language diagrams combined with a formal computational model as a key solution to specify requirements, generate design alternatives, and code for simulation. This paper proposes a formal framework and supporting tools to represent the application requirements, the library of network components, the environment description, and the rules to compose them. The framework allows to generate code for design validation by simulation and provides back annotation mechanism of the simulation results to refine the original model.