Architecture Analysis and System Debugging

Given the complexity of SoC development in the nanotechnology, it has become critical to fully validate the system performance at the early stage of the SoC design flow. This chapter describes the tools and methods for evaluating the overall SoC interconnect performance, for which the commercial solutions are not yet available. The proposed methodology is based on SystemC simulation using a generic IP Traffic Generator (IPTG) and a powerful monitoring mechanism called SysProbe, which are applicable all through the SoC analysis flow ranging from the transactional to register transfer level (RTL) simulations. Such Traffic Generators model the system IPs and the system traffic dependency with a refinement flow, while real slaves or targets are used to generate the correct latency. The SoC architecture is modeled either at the transactional or RTL level according to the requirements of development costs, simulation speed and precision. SysProbe provides the results of the architectural analysis to SoC architects.