SplitPro: A tool to overcome SystemC scheduling inefficiencies

SplitPro is a tool that processes the code of large SystemC modules and splits them into two or more smaller ones without affecting functionality. The purpose of this process splitting is to overcome some inherent inefficiencies of the SystemC 2.1 scheduler, such as unnecessary process wake-up calls, and unnecessary evaluation of portions of code that do not change the output of the system at the end of the simulation clock cycle. These two phenomena negatively affect the simulation speed. SplitPro automatically traces signal dependencies and generates the split processes. The generated code is in standard SystemC notation. In this paper, we present the main idea of SplitPro, and outline its advantages as well as its limitations. We focus on specific experimental results obtained on a number of SystemC processes to illustrate the method, showing up to 92% increase in simulation speed.