DIMES: an iterative emulation platform for Multiprocessor-System-On-Chip designs

DIMES (Delaware Iterative Multiprocessor Emulation System) is a new FPGA based hardware emulator for large logic systems incorporating a number of identical functional modules such as a Multiprocessor-System-On-Chip or a cellular architecture. It aims to provide both logic verification and early software development environments with dramatically improved cost performance. Under our iterative emulation technology, a part of FPGA resource will be time-shared among several identical modules of the target design and iteratively used to emulate them in multiple steps. The representation of the identical modules in the FPGA consists of (1) a single module copy and (2) a storage block holding all the states of the modules during iterative emulation. On a first implementation of DIMES-called DIMES/P, we have implemented a multiprocessor-system-on-chip design of the IBM Cyclops architecture as a case study. We report our preliminary results and experience of exploiting the iterative emulation technology in Cyclops emulation.