User-space emulation framework for heterogeneous SOC design
A user-space emulation framework for heterogeneous system-on-chip (SoC) design is provided. Embodiments described herein propose a portable, Linux-based emulation framework to provide an ecosystem for hardware-software co-design of heterogeneous SoCs (e.g., domain-specific SoCs (DSSoCs)) and enable their rapid evaluation during the pre-silicon design phase. This framework holistically targets three key challenges of heterogeneous SoC design: accelerator integration, resource management, and application development. These challenges are addressed via a flexible and lightweight user-space runtime environment that enables easy integration of new accelerators, scheduling heuristics, and user applications, and the utility of each is illustrated through various case studies. A prototype compilation toolchain is introduced that enables automatic mapping of unlabeled C code to heterogeneous SoC platforms. Taken together, this environment offers a unique ecosystem to rapidly perform functional verification and obtain performance and utilization estimates that help accelerate convergence towards a final heterogeneous SoC design.