Tackling an Abstraction Gap: Co-simulating SystemC DE with Bluespec ESL

Abstract

The growing SystemC community for system level design exploration is a result of SystemC's capability of modeling at RTL and above RTL abstraction levels. However, managing shared state concurrency using multi-threading in large SystemC models is error prone. A recent extension of SystemC called Bluespec-SystemC (BS-ESL) counters this difficulty with its model of computation employing atomic rule-based specifications. However, for simulating a model that is partly designed in SystemC and partly using BS-ESL, an interoperability semantics and implementation of such a semantic is required. This paper views the interoperability problem as an abstraction gap closure problem. To illustrate the problem, the simulation semantics of BS-ESL and discrete-event simulation of RTL SystemC were formalized and provide a solution based on this formalization