Functional and Performance Modeling of Concurrency in VCC

Abstract

VCC®(Virtual Component Co-Design) is a system level software tool that supports the design of concurrent systems by specifying the functional model as a set of interconnected functional blocks, the system architecture, and the mapping between functional blocks and architectural elements. VCC provides functional simulation, performance estimation, and refinement of the model to implementation. This chapter provides a brief tutorial on the VCC tool. It describes the model of concurrency in VCC's default discrete event model of computation. While modeling a system, the importance of separating the behavioral model from the implementation architecture is emphasized. The techniques used to model performance and implementation of the architecture components, as a set of collaborating services, are explained in some detail. Customization of the model of computation, and communication between functional blocks is also discussed. An example is provided that demonstrates the dataflow model of computation implemented on top of the VCC infrastructure. Finally the automatic generation of an implementation from VCC (in terms of HDL and/or C, and the communication code) is described.