Aspects may include a method of designing a system-on-chip. The method may include receiving multiple processing modules, each representing in software one of multiple processing units of a system-on-chip. The method may further include modeling communications from one or more of the multiple processing modules as accesses to memory. The method may further include generating a coherent memory module associated with the multiple processing modules based on modeling the communications from the one or more of the multiple processing modules as accesses to memory. The coherent memory module may represent in software a coherent memory associated with the multiple processing units.