Vector mode based hardware acceleration and emulation for LDPC application

摘要

Purpose - With the rapid development of integrated circuits, verification of SOC chips has become a great challenge due to its integration and complexity. Traditional software-based simulation methodology cannot meet verification needs. Therefore, FPGA-based hardware acceleration technologies are requested in SOC verification. The classic methodology of hardware acceleration downloads the DUT (Device under Test) to the FPGA, while part of RTL codes and test bench is still run on the simulator in the workstation. Research found that the speed bottleneck of this methodology is mostly caused by the ping-pong mode of data transmission between workstation software and the FPGA emulator, thus resulting in that channel transmission time takes too much proportion of total time. The purpose of this paper is to present a vector mode based hardware/software co-emulation methodology, which leverages a pipeline structure to transmit, receive and buffer data. This methodology reduces the communication overhead by carrying out a parallel mechanism in that while user's design is under test in the emulator, signal data are transmitting in the channel simultaneously, thus increasing the speed of hardware acceleration and emulation. Design/methodology/approach - The methodology of hardware acceleration proposed by this paper intercepts data for once from the emulation process of a traditional platform as test bench and utilizes direct memory access (DMA) channel to speed up data transfer, as well as increasing reasonable data caching mechanism, which reduces the ratio of channel transmission time in the entire emulation time, achieving accelerating emulation. Findings - The proposed methodology and traditional hardware acceleration approach were tested on a quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (LDPC) decoder. Experiment results indicate that the proposed method can increase communication throughput 140 times compared with the traditional approach. Originality/value - A vector mode based hardware/software co-emulation methodology is presented in the paper. Higher communication throughput can be achieved by carrying out a parallel mechanism, as well as leveraging a pipeline structure to transmit, receive and buffer data.