A SystemC/TLM semantics in Promela and its Possible Applications

Claus Traulsen , Jérôme Cornet (1) , Matthieu Moy (1) , Florence Maraninchi (1)

1 VERIMAG - IMAG - VERIMAG

SystemC has become a de-facto standard for the modeling of systems-on-a-chip, at various levels of abstraction, including the so-called transaction level (TL). Verifying properties of a TL model requires that SystemC be translated into some formally defined language for which there exist verification back-ends. Since SystemC has no formal semantics, this includes a careful encoding of the SystemC scheduler, which has both synchronous and asynchronous features, and a notion of time. In a previous work, we described LusSy a complete chain from SystemC to a synchronous formalism and its associated verification tools. In this paper, we describe the encoding of the SystemC scheduler into a asynchronous formalism, namely Promela (the input language for Spin). We comment on the possible uses of this new encoding, and compare it with the synchronous encoding.

Keywords: SystemC; Transaction-Level-Modeling; Semantics; Model-Checking; Promela; SPIN

Domains: Embedded Systems

Claus Traulsen, Jérôme Cornet, Matthieu Moy, Florence Maraninchi. A SystemC/TLM semantics in Promela and its Possible Applications. 2007. ⟨hal-00294143⟩