Automated Nonintrusive Analysis of Electronic System Level Designs

Abstract

Due to the ever increasing complexity of hardware systems, designers strive for higher levels of abstractions in the early stages of the design process. Modeling hardware at the electronic system level (ESL) is one way to address this demand, with the C++-based system modeling framework SystemC and its abstract communication library transaction level modeling (TLM) having become de-facto standards for ESL system design. While the C++ compiler is sufficient to compile and simulate a given ESL design, for tasks of design understanding, debugging, or validation (where access to the details of design’s structure and behavior is necessarily required), design needs to be processed by an appropriate tool. This problem is often solved by adding instrumentation code to either the design or the library, usually resulting in incomplete logs, work overhead and/or incompatibilities. This paper introduces an approach that automatically extracts information about both, structure and behavior of SystemC designs and TLM transactions, nonintrusively. The information is retrieved from a given design by running it in debug mode while being connected to a preprogrammed debugger, thus leaving the existing sources and workflows untouched while collecting a vast amount of data without user intervention. Illustrating use cases, value change dump files of the SystemC models’ behavior and unified modeling language activity diagrams of transaction protocols are created automatically from simulation runs.