Tessera - NoC Simulator

Tessera is a cycle-accurate network-on-chip simulator written from scratch in Rust, as the successor to PAT-Noxim, the SystemC simulator from my master's research. It keeps what made PAT-Noxim useful to researchers (power, area and thermal modelling alongside latency) and drops the limits that came with SystemC.

The engine models routers with virtual channels and credit-based flow control on 2D mesh and torus topologies, with eight routing algorithms (from XY and odd-even to table-based routing imported from Noxim), four selection policies and three switch allocators including iSLIP. Traffic can be synthetic, closed-loop, or replayed from Netrace and SynFull traces.

Every run is deterministic. Per-node random streams and keyframe snapshots mean you can seek to any cycle and replay it bit for bit, and that replay doubles as a test oracle. Runs are recorded to Arrow and Parquet and queried with DuckDB, so comparing two experiments is a SQL query rather than a spreadsheet. A frozen plugin API, with an optional WebAssembly sandbox, lets new routing or traffic models register through the same path as the built-ins.

The workspace has 18 crates and 247 tests. Still open: bindings to the reference power and thermal models (DSENT, ORION, McPAT, HotSpot), parallel execution, and a web UI.