FALCON: An FPGA Emulation Platform for Domain-Specific Systems-on-Chip (DSSoCs)

Domain-specific systems-on-chip (DSSoCs), an emerging class of heterogeneous architectures, combine general-purpose processors and fixed-function hardware accelerators to provide programmability and superior energy efficiency for applications in a target domain. DSSoCs integrate several hardware components, resulting in higher design, implementation, and validation complexities. Significant emphasis on pre-silicon validation is required to eliminate functional and performance bugs to avoid the post-silicon failure cost and market loss penalties. Emulation frameworks accelerate pre-fabrication design validation by prototyping target designs. They also allow the early development of software, drivers, firmware, and performance analysis. This paper presents FALCON, a full-system DSSoC emulation platform that allows functional validation of DSSoCs as they interact with the operating system and runtime frameworks. We show that FALCON allows early software and driver development for accelerators and validates the system before the silicon availability. Finally, we demonstrate that FALCON enables rapid and extensive design space exploration to obtain early pre-silicon power and performance estimates.