Tutorial: Easy-to-use, FPGA-Accelerated Hardware Simulation of RISC-V Hardware Designs with FireSim on Amazon EC2 F1
Abstract
We present a tutorial for FireSim (https://fires.im), an easy-to-use, open-source, FPGA-accelerated cycle-accurate hardware simulation platform developed at UC Berkeley that runs on Amazon EC2 F1. FireSim automatically transforms and instruments open-hardware designs (e.g. RISC-V Rocket Chip and BOOM) using the MIDAS framework into fast, deterministic, FPGA-based simulators that enable productive pre-silicon verification and performance validation. By providing a framework to automate the management of FPGA infrastructure, FireSim also lets software developers get a head-start on building software for a novel hardware design, by letting these developers interact with the pre-silicon hardware design as they would a virtual machine. In effect, both hardware and software developers work from a single source of truth: the RTL for the hardware design. Leveraging AWS EC2 F1, FireSim removes the high capex and management complexity traditionally involved in large-scale FPGA-based simulation, democratizing access to realistic pre-silicon hardware modeling of new designs. In this half-day tutorial, we cover the open-source FireSim framework, explore how users can use and modify the existing designs available in FireSim, and show how users can integrate and measure their own hardware designs. Presented by Sagar Karandikar, David Biancolin and Alon Amid
