Realistically Rendering SoC Traffic Patterns with Interrupt Awareness

In Multi-Processor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) design stages, accurate modeling of IP behaviour is crucial to analyze interconnect effectiveness. However, parallel development of components may cause IP core models to be still unavailable when tuning communication performance. Traditionally, synthetic traffic generators have been used to overcome such an issue. However, target applications increasingly present non-trivial execution flows and synchronization patterns, especially in presence of underlying operating systems and when exploiting interrupt facilities. This property makes it very difficult to generate realistic test traffic. This paper presents a selection of applications using interrupt-based synchronization; a reference methodology to split such applications in execution subflows and to adjust the overall execution stream based upon hardware events; a reactive simulation device capable of correctly replicating such software behaviours in the MPSoC design phase. Additionally, we validate the proposed concept by showing cycle-accurate reproduction of a previously traced application flow.