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High-level hardware modeling via simulation is an essential step in hardware systems design and research. Despite the importance of simulation, current model creation methods are error prone and are unnecessarily time consuming. To address these problems, we have publicly released the Liberty Simulation Environment (LSE), Version 1.0, consisting of a simulator builder and automatic visualizer based on a shared hardware description language. LSE's design was motivated by a careful analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of existing systems. This has resulted in a system in which models are easier to understand, faster to develop, and have performance on par with other systems. LSE is capable of modeling any synchronous hardware system. To date, LSE has been used to simulate and convey ideas about a diverse set of complex systems including a chip multiprocessor out-of-order IA-64 machine and a multiprocessor system with detailed device models.
Vachharajani et al. (Mon,) studied this question.