Section: Software and Platforms

SimSoC

Participants : Vania Joloboff [correspondant] , Antoine Rouquette, Shenpeng Wang.

SimSoC is an infrastructure to run simulation models which comes along with a library of simulation models. SimSoC allows its users to experiment various system architectures, study hardware/software partition, and develop embedded software in a co-design environment before the hardware is ready to be used. SimSoC aims at providing high performance, yet accurate simulation, and provide tools to evaluate performance and functional or non functional properties of the simulated system.

SimSoC is based on SystemC standard and uses Transaction Level Modeling for interactions between the simulation models. The current version is based on the open source libraries from the OSCI Consortium: SystemC version 2.3 and TLM 2.0.1 [39] , [21] . Hardware components are modeled as TLM models, and since TLM is itself based on SystemC, the simulation is driven by the SystemC kernel. We use standard, unmodified, SystemC, hence the simulator has a single simulation loop.

The third open source version of SimSoC, release 0.8.0, has been released in September 2013. It contains a full simulator for ARM (V5 and V6) and PowerPC both running at an average speed of about 100 Millions instructions per second in, and a deprecated simulator for the MIPS architecture. SimSoC is distributed under LGPL on Inria Gforge web site.