TUFFAN: A TLM Framework for Fast Architecture Exploration of Digital Systems

For design of today’s large digital systems, a modeling approach for early exploration of different possible architectures is useful. The modeling approach should be fast, simple and powerful to enable examining several possible architectures. Also, it should contain facilities that support user-defined and future standard communication architectures. In this paper, we introduce a Transaction Level framework that contains predefined components for fast and easy specification of a system being designed. Our approach is based on bus-based communication architectures. Some models of standard buses have been included to help user examining different architectures. Some approximate-timed components are also added to improve the behavior of system models and for better modeling of time-dependent functionalities of communications