Mapping Actor-Oriented Models to TLM Architectures ABSTRACT.pdfVIP

In Proceedings of Forum on Specification Design Languages 2007 (FDL 2007) Barcelona, Spain, September 18-20, 2007, c?ECSI Mapping Actor-Oriented Models to TLM Architectures Jens Gladigau1, Bernhard Niemann2, Christian Haubelt1, and Jürgen Teich1 1University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany {jens.gladigau,haubelt,teich}@cs.fau.de 2Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, Erlangen, Germany nmn@iis.fraunhofer.de ABSTRACT Actor-oriented modeling approaches are convenient for im- plementing functional models of embedded systems. Archi- tectural models for heterogeneous system-on-chip architec- tures, however, are usually implemented using transaction level modeling (TLM). Even though both modeling paradi- gms, actor-oriented design and TLM, can conveniently be implemented using a common language such as SystemC, a methodology to smoothly integrate both approaches is still missing. In order to benefit from the best of both worlds, i.e., analyzability of actor-oriented models as well as fast simulation and synthesis from TLM, a combination of these two methodologies could be the next step towards electronic system level design. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach for mapping actor-oriented models onto complex TLM architectures. In particular, we will show how to map synchronization and data transport between actors to TLM 2.0 compliant bus protocols. The key contribution of this paper lies in our proposed methodology, which requires only a few additional lines of source code to map actor commu- nication in actor-oriented SystemC models to TLM archi- tectures and does not demand any reimplementation of the actors. 1. INTRODUCTION Actor-oriented design [17, 16] is a widely accepted me- thodology for co-design. In a modular manner, concurrency and communication between components, called actors, is emphasized. Actors execute concurrently and communicate with each other over abstract channels, e.g., FIFO chan- nels. Many important models of computation s