Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers
Functional simulators find widespread use as subsystems within microarchitectural simulators. The speed of functional simulators is strongly influenced by the implementation style of the functional simulator, e.g. interpreted vs. binary translated simulation. Speed is also strongly influenced by the level of detail of the interface the functional simulator presents to the rest of the timing simulator. This level of detail may change during design space exploration, requiring corresponding changes to the interface and the simulator. However, for many implementation styles, changing the interface is difficult.