Assertion-based flow monitoring of SystemC models

SystemC is the de facto standard system-modeling language for hardware-software systems. A concurrent and reactive hardware-software system performs different “jobs” during its execution. Each such job begins with a set of input data, flows through different processes in the system, and finally produces a set of output data. We call such a job a flow, since it flows from one process to another. Flows are dynamic and concurrent; a flow can begin anytime during the simulation and the system can process multiple flows at the same time. We provide a library for explicitly implementing flows in a SystemC model or annotating flows in an existing SystemC model with minimal modification. We also provide an automated monitoring framework for monitoring properties of flows. Such properties capture the reactive nature of a system naturally and are intuitive to write. Our experimental results show that the framework adds minimal simulation runtime overhead.