Efficiently Exploiting Low Activity Factors to Accelerate RTL Simulation

Abstract

Hardware simulation is a critical tool for design, but its slow speed often bottlenecks the entire design process. Although most signals in a digital design rarely change, most leading simulators still simulate the entirety of the design every cycle. Tracking which signals are unchanged and can thus be reused typically introduces too much overhead to deliver a practical speedup.In this work, we explore the challenge of efficiently detecting opportunities for reuse, and we demonstrate practical techniques to profitably exploit them. Thanks to our novel acyclic partitioning algorithm and other optimizations, our generated simulators outperform open-source and industrial state-of-the-art simulators.

Topics & Concepts