SoCRocket – Transaction-Level Modeling Framework for Space Applications

Increasingly large portions of electronic systems are being implemented in software, and its development cost starts dominating the overall system's cost. Software is also becoming the critical part of the development schedule, mainly because deploying and testing it on the real target hardware is complicated.

TLM can be used to describe both, timing and functionality, of system components and their communication interfaces at a high abstraction level. Embedded in a virtual platform, these models are sufficiently accurate to not only allow early software development and verification in a realistic environment but also functional verification of the modeled hardware. The capability of early design-space exploration is therefore a vital building block of full hardware/software co-design.

To achieve these goals, we designed the SoCRocket Framework. Written in SystemC/TLM, it is fitted to serve the space industry's special needs and builds the foundation of space-domain ESL design. For enabling the construction of virtual platforms, we tied together the following features:

<dl><dt>Models</dt><dd>All models are designed to simulate their coresponding counterparts from the Aeroflex Gaisler GRLib</dd><dt>Analysis Tools</dt><dd>Dump to Log, DB or Waveform</dd><dt>Performance Counter</dt><dd>Various counters are implemented in the modules for throughput and other activity monitoring</dd><dt>Power Modeling</dt><dd>The models feature dedicated power-consumption measuring</dd><dt>Co-Simulation</dt><dd>Direct comparrison to RTL is possible and was used in verification</dd><dt>Platform Generator</dt><dd>Easy configuration via GUI or from the command line</dd><dt>Automation Tools</dt><dd>To run big batches of design-space explorations</dd><dt>Infrastructure</dt><dd>Reusable components for building new components at ease</dd><dt>Build System</dt><dd>Extended build system for compiling models, platforms, target software, RTL co-simulations, and regression tests is also available at the Accellera page</dd></dl>

Further information: https://projects.c3e.cs.tu-bs.de/socrocket/

Contact: Rolf Meyer, Jan Wagner, Bastian Farkas