MCsim: An Extensible DRAM Memory Controller Simulator

Numerous proposals for memory controller (MC) designs have been exposed to the research community. Interest has since been growing in the area of computer architecture and real-time systems to improve the throughput of the system and/or guarantee timing requirements through novel scheduling algorithms. Consequently, comprehensive simulators are highly demanded since they provide an infrastructure for development of new ideas effectively without re-implementing the other parts of the hardware. Although there has been several proposals for off-chip memory device simulators, there is a shortage in their MC counterparts. In this letter, we propose MCsim, an extensible and cycle-accurate MC simulator. Designed as an integrable environment, MCsim is able to run as a trace-based simulator as well as provide an interface to connect with external CPU and memory device simulators.