RIROS: A Parallel RTL Fault SImulation FRamework with TwO-Dimensional Parallelism and Unified Schedule

TL;DR

RIROS is a novel parallel RTL fault simulation framework that employs two-dimensional parallelism and a unified scheduling approach, significantly accelerating fault simulation for safety-critical chip verification.

Contribution

It introduces a two-dimensional parallel method combining structural and fault-level parallelism with a unified scheduling approach, reducing bubbles and improving simulation speed.

Findings

Achieves 7.0x speedup over state-of-the-art tools.

Achieves 11.0x speedup over commercial tools.

Effectively balances task loads in fault simulation.

Abstract

With the rapid development of safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and embodied intelligence, the functional safety of the corresponding electronic chips becomes more critical. Ensuring chip functional safety requires performing a large number of time-consuming RTL fault simulations during the design phase, significantly increasing the verification cycle. To meet time-to-market demands while ensuring thorough chip verification, parallel acceleration of RTL fault simulation is necessary. Due to the dynamic nature of fault propagation paths and varying fault propagation capabilities, task loads in RTL fault simulation are highly imbalanced, making traditional singledimension parallel methods, such as structural-level parallelism, ineffective. Through an analysis of fault propagation paths and task loads, we identify two types of tasks in RTL fault simulation: tasks that are few in number but high in load, and tasks that are numerous but low in load. Based on this insight, we propose a two-dimensional parallel approach that combines structurallevel and fault-level parallelism to minimize bubbles in RTL fault simulation. Structural-level parallelism combining with workstealing mechanism is used to handle the numerous low-load tasks, while fault-level parallelism is applied to split the high-load tasks. Besides, we deviate from the traditional serial execution model of computation and global synchronization in RTL simulation by proposing a unified computation/global synchronization scheduling approach, which further eliminates bubbles. Finally, we implemented a parallel RTL fault simulation framework, RIROS. Experimental results show a performance improvement of 7.0 times and 11.0 times compared to the state-of-the-art RTL fault simulation and a commercial tool.