A networks-on-chip (NoC) simulator allows designers to early estimate performance (latency and throughput), energy efficiency (average/peak power, average energy per packet) and area of several networks on-chip configurations at different CMOS nodes. This tool is a cycle-accurate simulator and is open-source using SystemC, a C++ plugin, which is used to quickly model complex systems at a higher level but less details than RTL. NoCTweak was developed by Dr. Anh Tran and Dr. Bevan Baas at UC Davis.
NoCTweak has been extended and integrated into McSim, a project developed by Dr. Abdoulaye Gamatié, Dr. Gilles Sassatelli, Dr. Manuel Selva et al. at LIRMM lab. McSim is a simulator for NoC-based many-core platforms, and is a part of the DreamCloud European project. DreamCloud allows dynamic resource allocation in many-core systems targeting high performance and energy efficient embedded applications.
DreamCloud and McSim link: https://github.com/DreamCloud-Project
Features
- benchmarks: synthetic, real/embedded applications, multithread traces
- topologies: mesh, torus, ring
- router architectures: wormhole, virtual channel, circuit-switched, shared queues
- routing algorithms: deterministic, adaptive, table-based
- arbitrating policies: round-robin, iSLIP, winner takes all