GVE: Godson-T Verification Engine for many-core architecture rapid prototyping and debugging

In this paper, we present a Godson-T Verification Engine (GVE) to rapidly prototype and debug our Godson-T many-core processor design. GVE adopts the state-of-the-art hardware platform which contains 6 Xilinx Virtex-5 LX330 FPGAs, thus permitting us to map our many-core processor and peripheral devices into it. Besides the hardware, our toolkit Godson-T Studio provides the compiler, program loader, debugger and monitor to fulfil the purpose of developing, profiling and debugging, while the accuracy loss problem is settled by our novel techniques: Check-point and ILA-Check, presented in this paper. To our experience, GVE greatly reduces the verification cycle due to its high execution speed, for example, it finishes thousands of testcases in an hour, where the software-based approach takes few days to run. And by the help of the checkpoint framework, we can easily locate the faults. Because of these features, GVE makes a great contribution to the 16-tile Godson-T tape-out Project.