FlexTiles Adaptive Multicore SoC Virtual Platform Now Available from Imperas

Imperas Technologies Used for FlexTiles Program

Oxford, United Kingdom, 2 June 2015 - Imperas Software Ltd. (www.imperas.com), the leader in high-performance software simulation, today announced that a virtual platform for the FlexTiles platform is now available, based on Imperas™ and Open Virtual Platforms™ (OVP™) simulators and models.

The FlexTiles platform is a self-adaptive heterogeneous multicore 3D System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture developed by a consortium of universities, research institutes and commercial companies, with funding from the European Union under the Seventh Framework Programme. A major challenge in computing is to leverage multicore technology to develop energy-efficient high-performance systems. This is critical for embedded systems with a very limited energy budget, as well as for supercomputers in terms of sustainability. Moreover, the efficient programming of multicore architectures is critical, especially with more than a thousand cores per SoC predicted by 2020. These challenges were the drivers for the FlexTiles project.

The FlexTiles project has developed an energy-efficient, programmable many-core platform with self-adaptive capabilities, along with an innovative virtualization layer and a dedicated tool flow. As similar architectures are adopted in industry, improvements in programming efficiency, and therefore reductions in time to market, are expected, together with a reduction in overall development costs of 20 to 50%.

The project successfully used the OVP technologies to create a many-core virtual platform, which is available at no cost from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and from the OVP Library page for KIT. Imperas simulation and OVP models were selected because of superior performance and the availability of open source models. While the FlexTiles architecture is not processor-specific, the Xilinx MicroBlaze was used to demonstrate the capabilities of the architecture, both in demo hardware and in the virtual platform.

“M*SDK™, the OVP APIs and the OVP library of models have been a great asset to the FlexTiles project, enabling us to quickly create a virtual platform for our advanced architecture,” stated Stephan Werner of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. “We were able to use the Imperas technology and tools to develop multiple demonstrations of the FlexTiles architecture, including multiple hardware configurations, the Network on Chip (NoC) developed in this project and the operating system and software tools for FlexTiles.”

Simon Davidmann, CEO of Imperas, said: “The FlexTiles project is visionary, and Imperas has been pleased to support it, both during the development phase and now with the distribution of the virtual platform. For a project with this level of many-core scalability, high performance simulation and models are key.”

Dave Tokic, Senior Director of Partner Ecosystems at Xilinx, commented: “We’re excited to see Xilinx FPGAs, including the MicroBlaze cores, used in a project with such far-reaching impact. High performance processor models, virtual platforms and software development tools, such as are available from Imperas and OVP, are critical to the quality and success of embedded software projects.”

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