UC Santa Cruz

As time goes on, hardware designs get ever more complicated, and producing designs that work properly on time is crucial. An essential part of the design process is debugging by way of a digital logic simulation. Frustratingly, simulation feels very slow, taking hours of real time to simulate just a few seconds of a sufficiently complex design. Several solutions exist in this space, most of them commercial, but also some free and open source options. ESSENT is a relatively novel simulator that improves simulation performance by cleverly partitioning the design and then re-computing only the changed parts of the design. However, an important shortcoming is that all repeated hardware components are inlined, leading to bloated code sizes since there is effectively no longer any reuse. This work describes an improvement to the tool that deduplicates the largest and most frequently reused components to achieve a speedup of up to 4.7× compared to the previous version of ESSENT, and up to 15× compared to Verilator, greatly reducing the time needed to perform a simulation and improving designer productivity.