Naviq NoC Simulator

Naviq is a public gem5 fork with a cycle-level AMD NoC extension. It supports AXIS and AXI-MM traffic, BRAM, DDR, HBM, CPU, SmartNIC, and optional RTL experiments. main is the supported public branch; integration work is validated through pull requests before it is merged.

Project owner and maintainer: Professor Deming Chen, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Start with the NoC user guide, repository layout, and test guide. The experiment launcher lists reproducible campaigns and their external requirements.

Quick start

Create an isolated Python environment for the NoC experiment and analysis tools:

python3 -m venv .venv
. .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

Build the gem5 variant for your workload:

Variant	ISA	Use case
NULL	None	NoC-only traffic-generator simulations and portable tests
ARM	ARM	ARM CPU compatibility scenarios
RISCV	RISC-V	RISC-V CPU compatibility scenarios
X86	X86	X86 CPU, DDR, and SmartNIC scenarios

scons build/NULL/gem5.opt -j$(nproc)

Replace NULL with ARM, RISCV, or X86 when needed. Replace .opt with .debug for a debug build with full assertions.

Running and testing

Run a small NoC-only scenario from the repository root:

./build/NULL/gem5.opt src/noc/testing/generic/aximm_1_to_1_close_smoke.py

Run the portable quick gate and the HBM gate from tests/:

cd tests
./main.py run --skip-build --length=quick --isa=NULL --variant=opt gem5/noc
./main.py run --skip-build --isa=NULL --variant=opt \
  --exclude-tags '.*' --include-tags noc-hbm gem5/noc

CPU setup commands are maintained as compatibility paths. Use the CPU NoC guide rather than copying unvalidated topology paths from old notes.

NoC documentation

• NoC user guide
• NoC architecture
• NoC source guide
• NoC testing and release gates
• Reproducible experiments
• Experiment guide
• Repository layout
• Artifact policy
• Archive index
• Maintenance backlog
• Release status and limitations
• Publication checklist

Upstream gem5

Naviq retains gem5's source and licensing. For general gem5 build, configuration, resources, and contribution guidance, see the gem5 documentation and the upstream repository. For AMD NoC background, see the AMD NoC documentation.