Extracting behavior and dynamically generated hierarchy from SystemC models

Abstract

We present a novel approach to extract the dynamically generated module hierarchy and its behavior from a SystemC model. SystemC is a popular modeling language which can be used to specify systems at a high abstraction level. The module hierarchy of a SystemC model is dynamically constructed during the execution of the elaboration phase of the model. This means that a system designer can build regular structures using loops and conditional statements. Currently, most SystemC tools can not cope with SystemC models for which the module hierarchy depends on dynamic parameters. In our approach this hierarchical information is retrieved by controlling and monitoring the executing of the elaboration phase of the model using a GDB debugger. Thereafter, the behavioral information is retrieved by using a GCC plug-in. This plug-in produces abstract syntax trees in static single assignment form. This behavioral information is linked with the hierarchical information. Our approach is completely non-intrusive. The SystemC model and the SystemC reference implementation can be used without any modification. We have implemented our approach in a SystemC front-end called SHaBE (SystemC Hierarchy and Behavior Extractor). This frontend facilitates the development of future SystemC visualization, debugging, static verification, and synthesis tools.

Data extraction from SystemC designs using debug symbols and the SystemC API

“…[5], [8], [9], [19]) additionally consider the dynamic behavior of a given SystemC program. For this purpose, the considered SystemC description is executed and the desired dynamic information is obtained during run-time.…”

“…Even recently published hybrid systems PinaVM [14] and SHaBE [5] are applying complex measures to extract system designs that cannot be easily ported to other project structures. SHaBE "uses the GNU debugger (GDB) to retrieve the module hierarchy from a SystemC model" and a GCC plugin to retrieve static information.…”

“…Given a PDB-file created by the VC++ compiler from a SystemC design, all topmost debug symbols are loaded first (line 2). Afterwards, each symbol is separately considered and analyzed (lines [3][4][5]. The desired information is thereby dumped into an XML-data structure representing the static information of the system.…”

A static analysis approach to data race detection in SystemC designs

“…An internal representation of a SystemC program can be built with dynamic, static or hybrid approaches [2]. A dynamic-based method for deadlock detection is presented in [3].…”

“…The hybrid approach for SystemC program analysis is used in [2], [5], [6] and [7]. In [2] a program representation is built using static and dynamic information.…”