Source-Level Performance, Energy, Reliability, Power and Thermal (PERPT) Simulation

• Published in: IEEE transactions on computer-aided design of integrated circuits and systems Vol. 36; no. 2; pp. 299 - 312
• Main Authors: Zhuoran Zhao, Gerstlauer, Andreas, John, Lizy K.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-02-2017
• Subjects: Computational modeling; Estimation; Host-compiled and source-level simulation; Integrated circuit modeling; Reliability; Software; Timing; virtual platform prototyping
• ISSN: 0278-0070; 1937-4151
• DOI: 10.1109/TCAD.2016.2578882

With ever increasing design complexities, traditional cycle-accurate or instruction-set simulations are often too slow or too inaccurate for system prototyping in early design stages. As an alternative, host-compiled or source-level software simulation has been proposed, but existing approaches have largely focused on timing simulation only. In this paper, we propose a novel source-level simulation infrastructure that provides a full range of performance, energy, reliability, power and thermal (PERPT) estimation. Using a fully automated, retargetable back-annotation framework, intermediate representation code is statically annotated with timing, energy and resource accesses information obtained from low-level references at basic block granularity. The annotated model is natively compiled and combined with a cache model and occupancy analyzer to provide target performance, energy, soft-error vulnerability and power estimations. Finally, generated power traces are fed into thermal models for further temperature estimation. Comprehensive evaluations of our source-level models for PERPT estimations are performed. We applied our approach to PowerPC targets running various industry benchmark suites. source-level simulations are evaluated for different PERPT metrics and with cache models at various levels of detail to explore the speed and accuracy tradeoffs. More than 90% accuracy can be achieved for timing, energy, reliability and power estimation, and an average error of 0.05 K exists in steady-state thermal estimation. Simulation speeds range from 180 to 5740 MIPS for different types of metrics at different abstraction levels.