Erich P. Stuntebeck, John S. Davis II, et al.
HotMobile 2008
Software based tools for simulation are not keeping up with the demands for increased chip and system design complexity. In this paper, we describe a cycle-accurate and cycle-reproducible large-scale FPGA platform that is designed from the ground up to accelerate logic verification of the Bluegene/Q compute node ASIC, a multi-processor SOC implemented in IBM's 45 nm SOI CMOS technology. This paper discusses the challenges for constructing such large-scale FPGA platforms, including design partitioning, clocking & synchronization, and debugging support, as well as our approach for addressing these challenges without sacrificing cycle accuracy and cycle reproducibility. The resulting fullchip simulation of the Bluegene/Q compute node ASIC runs at a simulated processor clock speed of 4 MHz, over 100,000 times faster than the logic level software simulation of the same design. The vast increase in simulation speed provides a new capability in the design cycle that proved to be instrumental in logic verification as well as early software development and performance validation for Bluegene/Q. © 2012 ACM.
Erich P. Stuntebeck, John S. Davis II, et al.
HotMobile 2008
Raymond Wu, Jie Lu
ITA Conference 2007
Pradip Bose
VTS 1998
Ehud Altman, Kenneth R. Brown, et al.
PRX Quantum