Design And Implementation Of Hardware NOC Simulator Based On Automatic Code Generation Technology

With the rapid development of the semiconductor technology and VLSI design techniques,more and more complex and high-performance requirements of the work is applied to embedded systems.However,as the process size becomes smaller and smaller,embedded applications on the growing demand for bandwidth make the traditional bus-based on-chip communication architecture face more and more challenges.As NoC has good scalability,flexibility,transmission parallelism and other characteristics,more and more people start to use it.As a result,NoC gradually replaced the traditional bus,which becomes a new kind of communications architecture.Because of the need to consider the topology,buffer size,routing algorithms,flow control mechanisms and many other parameters in the design of on-chip network,a detailed system-wide accurate assessment is essential for NoC.Obviously,the research of NoC simulator is becoming more and more essential.In the design process of the existing NoC simulator,the researchers need to describe the various NoC modules which are written in the form of VHDL code,and the VHDL code of the different architecture NoC modules are basically the same.Obviously,it would be a waste of energy to do the meaningless work.In order to solve the problem,this paper proposes a NoC hardware simulator-NOCsim which is based on automatic code generation technology.The simulator uses the automatic code generation technology in the hardware NoC simulator.By this kind of strategy,the automatic code generator could automatically generate VHDL code of the corresponding NoC modules,and then simulate it.According to this paper,the work of the automatic code generation system is mainly formed by three parts which are the XML modeling files,code templates,XML-based code templates and automatic code generation.Through the analysis of the experimental results,it is found that the NoC simulator proposed in this paper has a great improvement compared with Booksim in simulating the same network in several aspects,such as speed,area utilization and so on.And through experiments,it can be found that NOCsim can simulate much more quickly.