FREACSIM - A Framework for Creating and Simulating Real-Time Capable Network on Chip Systems and Applications

Abstract

This paper presents the new Framework for Real-time capable Embedded system and ArChitecture SIMulation (FREACSIM), a highly configurable full-system simulation environment enabling and easing the modeling, simulation and verification of Network on Chip architectures for hard real-time systems. The framework is mostly geared towards software developers, supporting them in the simulation of NoCs at an instruction accurate level and offers a broad variety of real-world hardware components as part of the integrated virtualization toolbox. FREACSIM provides a software-based routing strategy between nodes, with a single node consisting of a processor and required peripherals for enabling real-time capability. This allows a flexible and independent comparison of currently implemented hardware strategies, as well as an easy adaption to better suit new hardware needs. The softwarebased routing, as well as distributed applications that can be implemented for the NoC hardware design, are able to use the real-time operating system eCos, which is part of our framework. As a result, real-time capable software can be implemented for, and tested on, complex NoC systems. We demonstrate the flexibility and the benefits of our framework with a set of applications (use cases), which cover typical heavy and light load distributions between communication and computation.