Switchboard

Switchboard (SB) is a framework for communication between distinct hardware models, such as RTL simulations, RTL implemented on FPGAs, and fast SW models. This makes it possible to simulate large hardware systems in a distributed fashion, using whatever models are available for the different components.

Under the hood, communication happens through ultra-fast standardized shared-memory queues. A shared-memory SPSC queue is an appealing common interface because it is one of the fastest interprocess communication techniques, with latencies on the order of hundreds of nanoseconds; no system calls are required to transmit and receive data. At the same time, this type of queue is straightforward to implement for FPGA platforms, with queue read and write operations only requiring a handful of memory transactions.

To learn more about switchboard, please see the GitHub repo.