Modeling for AXI protocol in performance simulation

Abstract

Data transferring protocols of AXI family became a common way to integrate various devices into a computing system. A widespread approach of performance analysis of such computing systems is performance modeling using cycle-accurate and event-driven simulators. This article provides a top-down overview of general architecture principles of performance modeling, followed by a proposal to extend existing simulation infrastructure with a novel approach to model protocols of AXI family. The approach can be integrated directly to the framework of cycle-accurate simulation similar to Asim, hiding all the microarchitecture details into a simple yet effective layer of abstraction. As a result, this solution allows to maintain scalability of target models, including application of unit testing, TDD and UVM methodology. Along with the description of the algorithm, the article discusses its impact on simulation speed providing theoretical complexity estimations and actual measurement utilizing a benchmark suite.