FPGA-level emulation is a key step in pre-silicon chip design validation. However, emulating large-scale multi-core systems increasingly exceed the hardware resource capacity of a single FPGA, limiting the feasibility of full-system emulation. To address this challenge, we introduce EMiX, a scalable multi-FPGA framework that enables distributed emulation of multi-core RISC-V architectures beyond single-FPGA resource limits. EMiX systematically partitions a monolithic multi-core design into multiple components and deploys them across multiple interconnected FPGAs, effectively exploiting inter-FPGA interconnects to balance scalability and performance without requiring fundamental RTL redesign. We prototype EMiX with a 64-core architecture across eight interconnected Alveo U55c FPGAs (scalable on core and FPGA counts), successfully demonstrating full-system execution including Linux boot. EMiX will be released as an open-source platform.

翻译：FPGA级仿真是芯片设计预硅验证中的关键步骤。然而，对大规模多核系统的仿真日益超出单个FPGA的硬件资源容量，限制了全系统仿真的可行性。为解决这一挑战，我们提出了EMiX——一种可扩展的多FPGA框架，能够实现对超出单FPGA资源限制的多核RISC-V架构进行分布式仿真。EMiX系统性地将单一多核设计划分为多个组件，并将其部署在多个互连的FPGA上，有效利用FPGA间互连在可扩展性与性能之间取得平衡，而无需进行根本性的RTL重设计。我们基于八块互连的Alveo U55c FPGA（可扩展至更多核与FPGA数量）构建了64核架构原型，成功演示了包括Linux启动在内的全系统执行。EMiX将以开源平台形式发布。