SyCHOSys: Compiled Energy-Performance Cycle Simulation

SyCHOSys (Synchronous Circuit Hardware Orchestration System) generates high-speed energy-performance cycle simulators by compiling a processor description into efficient C++ code. This framework can custom compile a cycle simulator with arbitrary mixed levels of simulation detail ranging from gate-level to purely behavioral models. In addition, SyCHOSys can compile detailed energy statistics gathering code into the simulator and generate a custom analysis tool to combine the resulting statistics with capacitance values extracted from circuit layout information to give energy dissipation. To increase simulation speed, we group circuit nodes having the same switching activity and only count transitions once per group. We have also developed energy estimation techniques that exploit the properties of well-designed low-power microprocessors to improve the accuracy of simple transition-sensitive energy models. We evaluate SyCHOSys using a custom datapath circuit, and show close agreement (<7% error) with SPICE energy numbers, while simulating over 7 orders of magnitude faster than SPICE and 5 orders of magnitude faster than PowerMill. We also describe a structural energy-performance simulation of a pipelined MIPS processor built with SyCHOSys that can track all internal signal node transitions at 16 kHz.