Ultra-Fast NoC Emulation on a Single FPGA

Network-on-Chip (NoC) has become the de facto on-chip communication architecture for many-core systems. This paper proposes novel methods for emulating large-scale NoC designs on a single FPGA. Since FPGAs offer a highly parallel platform, FPGA-based emulation can be much faster than the software-based approach. However, emulating NoC designs with up to thousands of nodes is a challenging task due to the FPGA capacity constraints. We first describe how to accurately model synthetic workloads on FPGA by separating the time of the emulated network and the times of the traffic generation units. We next present a novel use of time-multiplexing in emulating the entire network using several physical nodes. Finally, we show the basic steps to apply the proposed methods to emulate different NoC architectures. The proposed methods enable ultra-fast emulations of large-scale NoC designs with up to thousands of nodes using only on-chip resources of a single FPGA. In particular, more than 5,000x simulation speedup over BookSim, a widely used software-based NoC simulator, is achieved.