2023 article
ERAS: A Flexible and Scalable Framework for Seamless Integration of RTL Models with Structural Simulation Toolkit
2023 IEEE INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON WORKLOAD CHARACTERIZATION, IISWC, pp. 196–200.
The prevalence of custom Intellectual Properties (IPs) poses challenges for assessing their system-level performance and functional behavior. Register Transfer Level (RTL) simulation requires RTL-level integration with the rest of the system which is time- and resource-intensive. Similarly, developing functional and performance models of the IP requires considerable effort and expertise.This work proposes a framework, ERAS, that enables seamless integration of RTL IP models with high-level architectural simulators, such as Structural Simulation Toolkit (SST). The effectiveness of this framework is demonstrated through architectural exploration using a RISCV processor. Further, ERAS leverages SST’s multi-thread support to enhance simulation speed, effectively overcoming a key bottleneck of detailed RTL simulation. Evaluation with a dual-core RISCV-RTL configuration shows 1.83× simulation speed improvement compared to a serial simulation in gem5 as baseline.ERAS is now part of SST public repository: Link