Implementing Multi-MoC Extensions for SystemC: Adding CSP & FSM Kernels for Heterogeneous Modeling

As SystemC gains popularity as a modeling language of choice for System-on-Chip designs, het- erogeneous modeling in SystemC and efficient simulation bec ome increasingly important. However, in the current reference implementation, all SystemC models are simulated through a non-deterministic Discrete-Event simulation kernel, which schedules events at run-time. This sometimes results in too many delta cycles hindering the simulation performance of the model. The SystemC language also uses this simulation kernel as the target simulation engine making it difficult to express different Models of Computation (MoC) naturally in SystemC. In an SoC model, different components may need to be nat- urally expressible in different MoCs. Some of these components may be amenable to static scheduling based simulation or other pre-simulation optimization techniques. Our goal is to create a simulation framework for heterogeneous SystemC models, to gain efficie ncy and ease of use within the framework of SystemC reference implementation. In this work, we focus on implementing separate kernels for Communicating Sequential Processes and Finite State Machine Models of Computation in SystemC for better modeling fidelity and efficiency.