GVSoC: A Highly Configurable, Fast and Accurate Full-Platform Simulator for RISC-V based IoT Processors

The last few years have seen the emergence of IoT processors: ultra-low power systems-on-chips (SoCs) combining lightweight and flexible micro-controller units (MCUs), often based on open-ISA RISC-V cores, with application-specific accelerators to maximize performance and energy efficiency. Overall, this heterogeneity level requires complex hardware and a full-fledged software stack to orchestrate the execution and exploit platform features. For this reason, enabling agile design space exploration becomes a crucial asset for this new class of low-power SoCs. In this scenario, high-level simulators play an essential role in breaking the speed and design effort bottlenecks of cycle-accurate simulators and FPGA prototypes, respectively, while preserving functional and timing accuracy. We present GVSoC, a highly configurable and timing-accurate event-driven simulator that combines the efficiency of C++ models with the flexibility of Python configuration scripts. GVSoC is fully open-sourced, with the intent to drive future research in the area of highly parallel and heterogeneous RISC-V based IoT processors, leveraging three foundational features: Python-based modular configuration of the hardware description, easy calibration of platform parameters for accurate performance estimation, and high-speed simulation. Experimental results show that GVSoC enables practical functional and performance analysis and design exploration at the full-platform level (processors, memory, peripherals and IOs) with a speed-up of 2500x with respect to cycle-accurate simulation with errors typically below 10% for performance analysis.

Automated summary

IoT processors have emerged in recent years, utilizing ultra-low power micro-controller units and application-specific accelerators to optimize performance and energy efficiency. High-level simulators play a crucial role in enabling agile design exploration while breaking speed and design effort bottlenecks.