Systematic Transaction Level Modeling of Embedded Systems with SystemC

TL;DR

This paper presents a systematic transaction level modeling (TLM) design flow for embedded systems using SystemC, enabling fast exploration, rapid prototyping, and early software development through a lightweight communication protocol and automated mapping methodology.

Contribution

It introduces a TLM approach with the SHIP protocol and a methodology for automatic HW/SW interface mapping in embedded system design.

Findings

Enables fast communication architecture exploration

Supports rapid prototyping of embedded systems

Facilitates early embedded software development

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of a transaction level modeling (TLM) design flow for straightforward embedded system design with SystemC. The goal is to systematically develop both application-specific HW and SW components of an embedded system using the TLM approach, thus allowing for fast communication architecture exploration, rapid prototyping and early embedded SW development. To this end, we specify the lightweight transaction-based communication protocol SHIP and present a methodology for automatic mapping of the communication part of a system to a given architecture, including HW/SW interfaces.