A Computational Reflection Mechanism To Support Platform Debugging In Systemc

System-level and Platform-based design, along with Transaction Level modeling (TLM) techniques and languages like SystemC, appeared as a response to the ever increasing complexity of electronics systems design, where complex SoCs composed of several modules integrated on the same chip have become very common. In this scenario, the exploration and verification of several architecture models early in the design flow has played an important role. This paper proposes a mechanism that relies on computational reflection to enable designers to interact, on the fly, with platform simulation models written in SystemC TLM. This allows them to monitor and change signals or even IP internal register values, thus injecting specific stimuli that guide the simulation flow through corner cases during platform debugging, which are usually hard to handle by standard techniques, thus improving functional coverage. The key advantages of our approach are that we do not require code instrumentation from the IP designer, do not need a specialized SystemC library, and not even need the IP source code to be able to inspect its contents. The reflection mechanism was implemented using a C++ reflection library and integrated into a platform modeling framework. We evaluate our technique through some platform case studies. Copyright 2007 ACM.8186Arajo, C., Barros, E., Almeida, M., Araujo, G., IPZip - An IP Distribution Framework (2006) Proceedings of the IP-SOC 2006, pp. 259-264. , DecAzevedo, R., Rigo, S., Bartholomeu, M., Araujo, G., Ara-jo, C., Barros, E., The ArchC Architecture Description Language (2005) International Journal of Parallel Programming, 33 (5), pp. 453-484. , OctBlack, D.C., Donovan, J., Bunton, B., Keist, A., (2004) SystemC: From the Ground Up, , KluwerCadence. Website, Jan. 2007.http://www.cadence.comWebsite, , http://www.coware.com, Jan. 2007Déharbe, D., Medeiros, S., Aspect-oriented design in systemC: Implementation and applications (2006) SBCCI '06: Proceedings of the 19th annual symposium on Integrated circuits and systems design, pp. 119-124. , New York, NY, USA, ACM Press(2007), http://www.eclipse.org, Eclipse, an open development platformFerber, J., Computational reflection in class based object-oriented languages (1989) OOPSLA '89: Conference proceedings on Object-oriented programming systems, languages and applications, pp. 317-326. , New York, NY, USA, ACM Press(2005) Transaction-Level Modeling with SystemC, , Frank Ghenassia, editor, SpringerLapalme, J., Aboulhamid, E.M., Nicolescu, G., A new efficient EDA tool design methodology (2006) Trans. on Embedded Computing Sys, 5 (2). , 408-430Mentor graphics. Website, , http://www.mentor.com, Jan. 2007(2007) PDesigner, , http://www.pdesigner.orgRoiser, S., Mato, P., The SEAL C++ reflection system (2004) CHEP '04: Presented in the Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics congress (CHEP'04), , CERN, Sept(2007), http://www.spiritconsortium.org, SPIRIT Consortiu