Highly-parallel special-purpose multicore architecture for SystemC/TLM simulations

The complexity of SystemC virtual prototyping is continuously increasing. Accelerating RTL/TLM SystemC simulations is essential to control future SoC development cost and time-to-market. In this paper, we present RAVES, a highly-parallel special-purpose multicore architecture that achieves simulation performance more efficiently by parallel execution of light-weight user-level threads on many small cores. We present a design study based on the virtual prototype of RAVES processors running a co-designed custom SystemC kernel. Our evaluation suggests that a 64-core RAVES processor can deliver up to 4.47× more simulation performance than a high-end x86 processor.