Khronos: Fusing Memory Access for Improved Hardware RTL Simulation

The use of register transfer level (RTL) simulation is critical for hardware design in various aspects including verification, debugging, and design space exploration. Among various RTL simulation techniques, cycle-accurate software RTL simulation is the most prevalent approach due to its easy accessibility and high flexibility. The current state-of-the-art cycle-accurate simulators mainly use full-cycle RTL simulation that models RTL as a directed acyclic computational graph and traverses the graph in each simulation cycle. However, the adoption of full-cycle simulation makes them mainly focus on optimizing the logic evaluation within one simulation cycle, neglecting temporal optimization opportunities.