Hybrid Emulation: Accelerating Software driven Verification and Debug
Hybrid emulation platform helped the Arm Mali GPU hardware and software integration shift-left. We could run software-driven architectural and conformance test suites at virtual platform speeds, while maintaining the full accuracy of the rest of the SoC. In this paper, we are demonstrating the solution for the challenges faced due to low design visibility while debugging GPU issues using real OS Apps on FPGA based Juno platform. Furthermore, because of the full design visibility of Hybrid emulation, it significantly helped the debug team to root cause the GPU issues and verifying corresponding fixes against the accurate virtual model with a quick turnaround time. Additionally, ARM fast models (ARMFMs) and Software Integrator Catalogue gave us great flexibly to plug-in different models to replicate our FPGA based Juno platform. Nevertheless, Hybrid SoC verifies the full integration of GPU IP with other HW components like CCI, DDR memory and other SoC peripherals which are integrated on the RTL side.
Issac Zacharia, Arm Ltd
Jitendra Aggarwal, Arm Ltd