Enhancing the functionality of a simulator for the analysis of data paths

This report describes the enhancements made to the Simulator application that makes part of DPATCH (Data Path Analysis Tool CHain). DPATCH has been under development within the context of the Octopus project, in collaboration with the Embedded Systems Institute, Océ, and Eindhoven University of Technology, during the last two years. One of the goals of Octopus is to support the work of data path designers, by providing them with a set of tools to create and analyze data paths. The introduction of the tool chain for the analysis of real data paths was the next step to follow. In order to make it possible, a close work with data path designers was needed. This allowed identifying the features that should still be included to successfully create the data path models and execute experiments to analyze their performance. Given this goal, an improved version of the Simulator has been created, which makes possible to use the tool chain to create the models of the selected data paths. At the same time, the new features included, make the tool more potentially usable to model other types of data paths. The correctness of the results provided by the experiments run with the Simulator, have been validated by comparing them with results provided by DSEIR (Design Space Exploration Intermediate Representation), another tool created also within the Octopus project. A big percentage of similarity was identified between the results obtained, and at the same time the differences observed were the start point to make corrections or improvements to the features that were tested. As a final result, a Simulator that is reliable to be used in the data path analysis process was created. There are nevertheless, other new features which would be desired to add in order to enhance even more the application. The implementation of these functionalities is considered future work.