Multi-accuracy power and performance transaction-level modeling

This paper introduces a modeling and simulation technique that extends transaction-level modeling (TLM) to support multi-accuracy models and power estimation. This approach provides different combinations of power and performance models, and the switching of model accuracy during simulation, allowing the designer to trade off between simulation accuracy and speed at runtime. This is particularly useful during the exploration phase of a design, when the designer changes the features or the parameters of the design, trying to satisfy its constraints. Usually, only limited portions of a system are affected by a single parameter change, and therefore, it is possible to fast-simulate uninteresting sections of the application. In particular, we show how to extend the TLM and modify the SystemC kernel to support multi-accuracy features. The proposed methodology has been tested on several benchmarks, among which is an MPEG4 encoder, showing that simulation speed can be increased of one order of magnitude. On the same benchmarks, we also show how it is possible to choose the optimal performance simulation accuracy for a given power model, maximizing simulation speed for the desired accuracy.