SystemC-Based Loose Models for Simulation Speed-Up by Abstraction of RTL IP Cores

The rapid increase of embedded systems design complexity has resulted in emergence of design methodologies at higher levels of abstraction such as Electronic System Level (ESL) and Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) with SystemC language as the main instrument. In practice, system architects and system integrators often have access to a library of legacy Register Transfer Level (RTL) IP (Intellectual Property) cores or obtain new ones from IP design houses. To address architectural exploration, early prototyping and simulation performance, such RTL IP cores are manually recreated at more abstract levels, which implies significant and error-prone effort. The current paper proposes an approach for automated abstraction of the computational part of cycle-accurate RTL IP cores to untimed TLM using a novel concept of SystemC-based Loose Models (SCLM). SCLMs provide for an instrument to neglect design model parts irrelevant for particular manipulation step of the abstraction process, thus simplifying the abstraction flow. As a result, the computational complexity of the abstraction process is reduced, thus increasing the overall scalability. The proposed abstraction flow is demonstrated on a set of benchmark designs and the first experimental results prove feasibility of the proposed approach and also show considerable simulation speed-up.