Fujitsu Labs Develops World's Fastest ARM CPU Simulator

[John P. Myers]

Fujitsu Laboratories Develops World's Fastest Simulation Technology Able to Faithfully Reproduce CPU Operations
With real-time precision, ultra-fast simulations promise to accelerate development of complex electronic equipment systems

Kawasaki, Japan, March 13, 2012 — Fujitsu Laboratories Limited today announced that it has developed the world's fastest simulation technology for systems using the ARM computing core, widely used in mobile phones and other electronic devices. This technology is able to faithfully reproduce hardware operations with cycle-for-cycle real-time accuracy.

Systems using the ARM core have become dramatically more complex in recent years, creating a need for a simulation technology that runs faster and with better fidelity to the hardware, for use both in testing whether the system runs as designed, and in application and operating-system development. What Fujitsu Laboratories has developed is a platform for running simulations that allows for cycle-level simulations with low system overhead, based on a just-in-time compiler. The end result is that a standard PC environment can simulate at the cycle level an ARM multicore system running at faster than 100 MHz, which represents a hundredfold speedup over previous simulators. With a margin of error of only about ±5% relative to the actual hardware, this simulator is fast and faithful.

This technology will help to shorten the development cycle for systems and devices using ARM cores and encourage the development of a greater diversity of ARM-based systems.

Details of this technology were presented at DATE 2012 (Design, Automation, & Test in Europe), which opened March 12 in Dresden, Germany.