TL;DR
FireBridge offers a cycle-accurate, fast co-verification framework that significantly reduces debug time for hardware and firmware integration in modern accelerators.
Contribution
It introduces a novel, efficient co-verification method enabling rapid firmware and hardware integration testing using standard simulators.
Findings
Achieves up to 50x speedup in debug iteration over FPGA-based flows.
Supports functional equivalence verification between firmware and RTL hardware.
Provides detailed profiling and protocol testing features for accelerator verification.
Abstract
Hardware-firmware integration is becoming a productivity bottleneck due to the increasing complexity of accelerators, characterized by intricate memory hierarchies and firmware-intensive execution. While numerous verification techniques focus on early-stage, approximate modeling of such systems to speed up initial development, developers still rely heavily on FPGA emulation to integrate firmware with RTL/HLS hardware, resulting in significant delays in debug iterations and time-to-market. We present a fast, cycle-accurate co-verification framework that bridges production firmware and RTL/gate-level hardware. FIREBRIDGE enables firmware debugging, profiling, and verification in seconds using standard simulators such as VCS, Vivado Xsim, or Xcelium, by compiling the firmware for x86 and bridging it with simulated subsystems via randomized memory bridges. Our approach provides off-chip…
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