Configuration and control of SystemC models using TLM middleware

Abstract

With the emergance of ESL design methodologies, frameworks are being developed to enable engineers to easily configure and control models-under-simulation. Each of these frameworks has proven good for its specific use case, but they are incompatible. ESL engineers must be able to leverage models and tools from different sources in order to be successful. But with today's diversity of configuration mechanisms, engineers spend too much time writing adapters between models that have been developed using different tools. We see a need for making the various existing configuration mechanisms cooperate. We present a solution based on a SystemC middleware. The middleware uses a generic transaction passing mechanism based on TLM-2 concepts and provides inter-operability between the different configuration interfaces in a heterogeneous design. The paper analyses configuration in general and explains the technical consideration for our middleware and shows how it makes the state-of-the-art configuration frameworks inter-operable.