SimRPU: A Simulation Environment for Reconfigurable Architecture Exploration

To assist the system architects with fast exploration and performance evaluation of the reconfigurable software/hardware architectures, this paper presents a system-level simulator, named after SimRPU, for the reconfigurable processing unit (RPU), which is the major computing engine in reconfigurable processor. The proposed simulator consists of a simulation kernel, a software compiler, a system profiler providing performance, area and power information for the desired architectures, and a system debugger supporting inspecting and modification of the internal state of the RPU. Object-oriented hierarchical and parameterized architecture modeling techniques are proposed to satisfy the requirements for a fast and comprehensive evaluation. Cycle-accurate simulation mechanisms are developed to improve the accuracy of the profiled performance data. Compared with the traditional register transfer level (RTL) based simulation scheme, the proposed simulator could achieve an average speedup of 18.5× with only 3.5% reduction on performance estimation accuracy. One reconfigurable processor targeted at high-definition multimedia decoding applications (such as H.264, MPEG2, AVS, etc.) is implemented with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company 65-nm process using the proposed exploration and design flow. The measured results show that the implemented architecture has obvious advantages in terms of both performance and power consumption than the reference designs in multimedia decoding applications.