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Through the Looking Glass: Automated Design Understanding of SystemC-Based VPs at the ESL

The emergence of virtual prototypes (VPs) at the electronic system level (ESL) has played a major role in modernizing the system-on-chips (SoCs) design process to raise design productivity and reduce time-to-market. A VP is an abstract and executable software model implemented typically using SystemC and its transaction-level modeling (TLM) framework. However, this modern VP-based design process still has weaknesses, in particular, due to the significant manual effort involved for design understanding, analysis, and modeling tasks which is both time consuming and error-prone. This article introduces an automated and fast design understanding approach that enables designers to trace detailed information of the VPs’ structure and behavior. Experimental results including a real-world VP-based SoC show the advantages of our approach, such as its accuracy, applicability, and scalability.