Automatic SystemC TLM Generation for Custom Communication Platforms

This paper presents a tool for automatic generation of transaction level models (TLMs) in SystemC for MPSoC de-signs with custom communication platforms. The MPSoC platform is captured as a graphical net-list of components, busses and bridge elements. The application is captured as C processes mapped to the platform components. Once the platform is decided, a set of transaction level commu-nication APIs is automatically generated for each applica-tion C process. After the C code is input, an executable SystemC TLM of the design is automatically generated us-ing our tool. This TLM can be executed using standard SystemC simulators for early functional verification of the design. Although, several TLM styles and standards have been proposed in the past, our approach differs in the fact that the designers do not need to understand the underly-ing SystemC code or TLM modeling style to verify that their application executes on the selected platform. Another key advantage of our tool is that the platform can be easily cus-tomized for the application and a new TLM for that plat-form can be automatically generated. The TLM can be used to program the custom platform early in the design cycle before the components are available. Our experimental re-sults demonstrate that for large industrial applications such as MP3 decoder and H.264, high-speed TLMs can be gen-erated for several platforms in a few seconds.