OpenRISC System-on-Chip Design Emulation

Abstract: Recently the hardware emulation technique has emerged as a promising approach to accelerating hardware verification/debugging process. To fully evaluate the powerfulness of the emulation approach and demonstrate its potential impact, we propose to emulate a system-on-chip (SoC) design using Mentor Graphics Veloce emulation platform. This article presents our project setup and the results we have achieved. The results are encouraging. ORPSoC emulation with Veloce has more than ten times faster than hardware simulation. Our experimental results demonstrate that Mentor Graphics Veloce has major advantages in emulation, verification, and debugging of complicated real hardware designs, especially in the context of SoC complexity. Through our three major tasks, we will demonstrate that (1) Veloce can successfully emulate large-scale SoC designs; (2) it has much better performance comparing to the state-of-the-art simulation tools; (3) it can significantly accelerate the process of hardware verification and debugging while maintaining full signal visibility.