Simulation of computer architectures has made rapid progress recently. The primary application areas are hardware/software performance estimation and optimization as well as functional and timing verification. Recent, innovative technologies such as retargetable simulator generation, dynamic binary translation, or sampling simulation have enabled widespread use of processor and system-on-chip (SoC) simulation tools in the semiconductor and embedded system industries. Simultaneously, processor and SoC simulation is still a very active research area, e.g. what amounts to higher simulation speed, flexibility, and accuracy/speed trade-offs. This book presents and discusses the principle technologies and state-of-the-art in high-level hardware architecture simulation, both at the processor and the system-on-chip level.

This book presents a methodology and the associated tooling for enabling design space exploration as well as a successive refinement flow for the design of optimized MP-SoCs with a high degree of automation.

A Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) is the key component for complex applications. These applications put huge pressure on memory, communication devices and computing units. This book, presented in two volumes – Architectures and Applications – therefore celebrates the 20th anniversary of MPSoC, an interdisciplinary forum that focuses on multi-core and multi-processor hardware and software systems. It is this interdisciplinarity which has led to MPSoC bringing together experts in these fields from around the world, over the last two decades. Multi-Processor System-on-Chip 1 covers the key components of MPSoC: processors, memory, interconnect and interfaces. It describes advance features of these components and technologies to build efficient MPSoC architectures. All the main components are detailed: use of memory and their technology, communication support and consistency, and specific processor architectures for general purposes or for dedicated applications.

After a brief introduction to low-power VLSI design, the design space of ASIP instruction set architectures (ISAs) is introduced with a special focus on important features for digital signal processing. Based on the degrees of freedom offered by this design space, a consistent ASIP design flow is proposed: this design flow starts with a given application and uses incremental optimization of the ASIP hardware, of ASIP coprocessors and of the ASIP software by using a top-down approach and by applying application-specific modifications on all levels of design hierarchy. A broad range of real-world signal processing applications serves as vehicle to illustrate each design decision and provides a hands-on approach to ASIP design. Finally, two complete case studies demonstrate the feasibility and the efficiency of the proposed methodology and quantitatively evaluate the benefits of ASIPs in an industrial context.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Workshop on Systems, Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation, SAMOS 2008, held in Samos, Greece, in July 2008. The 24 revised full papers presented together with a contamplative keynote and additional papers of two special workshop sessions were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on architecture, new frontiers, SoC, application specific contributions, system level design for heterogeneous systems, programming multicores, sensors and sensor networks; and systems modeling and design.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems, ARCS 2012, held in Munich, Germany, in February/March 2012. The 20 revised full papers presented in 7 technical sessions were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on robustness and fault tolerance, power-aware processing, parallel processing, processor cores, optimization, and communication and memory.

This book offers readers a set of new approaches and tools a set of tools and techniques for facing challenges in parallelization with design of embedded systems. It provides an advanced parallel simulation infrastructure for efficient and effective system-level model validation and development so as to build better products in less time. Since parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) has the potential to exploit the underlying parallel computational capability in today’s multi-core simulation hosts, the author begins by reviewing the parallelization of discrete event simulation, identifying problems and solutions. She then describes out-of-order parallel discrete event simulation (OoO PDES), a novel approach for efficient validation of system-level designs by aggressively exploiting the parallel capabilities of todays’ multi-core PCs. This approach enables readers to design simulators that can fully exploit the parallel processing capability of the multi-core system to achieve fast speed simulation, without loss of simulation and timing accuracy. Based on this parallel simulation infrastructure, the author further describes automatic approaches that help the designer quickly to narrow down the debugging targets in faulty ESL models with parallelism.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Architectures, Modeling, and Simulation, SAMOS 2009, held on Samos, Greece, on July 20-23, 2009. The 18 regular papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 52 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on architectures for multimedia, multi/many cores architectures, VLSI architectures design, architecture modeling and exploration tools. In addition there are 14 papers from three special sessions which were organized on topics of current interest: instruction-set customization, reconfigurable computing and processor architectures, and mastering cell BE and GPU execution platforms.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of 19th International Workshop on Power and Timing Modeling, Optimization and Simulation, PATMOS 2009, featuring Integrated Circuit and System Design, held in Delft, The Netherlands during September 9-11, 2009. The 26 revised full papers and 10 revised poster papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on variability & statistical timing, circuit level techniques, power management, low power circuits & technology, system level techniques, power & timing optimization techniques, self-timed circuits, low power circuit analysis & optimization, and low power design studies.