Abstract— The complexity of System on Chip (SoC) design is
increasing continuously with the use of MultiProcessor System on
Chip (MPSoC) architectures. Mastering the complexity of these
systems with a typical co-design workflow is really
recommended. As such, computer aided design tools are needed
to alleviate the task of designers. There is a lack of co-design tools
that support multiprocessor architectures with Operating System
(OS) support. Virtual platforms enable us to discover the
interactive design space exploration at early stage in the design.
They make designing embedded systems less tedious and elevate
the low technical details to manage systems complexity and
reduce time to market. In this paper, we present an exploration
of the Open Virtual Platform (OVP) capabilities for
multiprocessor architectures simulation. We particularly focus
on the inter-processor communication facilities. We illustrate this
study by a set of homogeneous and heterogeneous multiprocessor
architectures with different memory hierarchies and peripherals
followed by a run of several applications. We also integrate the
use of OS to permit workload distribution among processors
using several case studies to validate our system.
Keywords— Open Virtual Platform(OVP); multiprocessor;
homogeneous; heterogeneous; Operating System(OS); System on
Chip(SoC)