System exploration of SystemC designs

Due to increasing design complexity new methodologies for system modeling have been established in VLSI CAD. The SystemC methodology gains a significant reduction of design cycles by introducing an executable specification and a top down refinement strategy. But still the size and the complexity of SystemC models grow, making it harder to understand the basic ideas architects and their designs intend. This extends the familiarization phase for coworkers and project partners. In modern design flows, this can become a significant problem. In this work, we present an approach for interactive system exploration of SystemC designs and its implementation. The aim of our approach is to facilitate the orientation towards complex SystemC models without the need for simulation based techniques. Our tool accomplishes system exploration by allowing to navigate hierarchically through SystemC designs. It uses schematic visualization at different levels of abstraction to display the structure and the behavior of the design. Further support is given for different schematic views, a source code view, crossprobing, path fragment navigation and module exploration.