The simultaneous growth of new applications and death of transistor scaling trends is driving an explosion in custom silicon projects spanning all domains of computing. However, the enormous non-recurring engineering (NRE) cost of designing a modern system-on-a-chip (SoC) remains a major barrier to the wider adoption of custom silicon. Of concern to this dissertation is the lack of a good full-system simulation technology, a key driver of pre-silicon verification and validation costs. While field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) can be fast and relatively inexpensive hosts for simulation, mapping SoC clocking structures onto an FPGA such that they are represented accurately and deterministically is challenging. For this reason and others, many SoC designers turn to expensive hardware emulation platforms and their proprietary compilers. To radically reduce the cost of doing fast and accurate full-system simulation, the ADEPT Lab designed FireSim: an open-source, FPGA-based hardware emulation framework hosted in the public cloud.

In this dissertation, we begin by introducing FireSim’s compiler infrastructure, called Golden Gate, which is capable of performing general multi-cycle resource optimizations in order to fit large SoCs on a single FPGA. Here we extend Golden Gate to present non-invasive, optimization-compatible schemes for simulating SoC clocking structures. First, we describe a simple approach for simulating systems with multiple fixed-frequency clocks. We then generalize this to support a general class of clock and reset structures, which can be composed to simulate dynamic frequency scaling, using an approach based on prior work in conservative parallel discrete-event simulation. The resulting work differs from prior academic FPGA-based projects in that it supports a much larger space of input designs, is easier to deploy to other FPGAs, and, like any good simulator, is deterministic---all while supporting simulation rates fast enough to productively boot operating systems and run real applications.