Towards Proving TLM Properties with Local Variables

With the growing popularity and adoption of Electronic System Level (ESL) design, the verification of SystemC models at Transaction Level (TLM) has become an important research problem. In the context of formal verification, most of the existing approaches for SystemC TLM only consider basic properties such as deadlock-freedom or local assertions. In previous work, a high-level BMC-based property checking approach has been introduced. This approach enables to verify important TLM behavior such as the effect of a transaction and that the transaction is only started after a certain event. This paper proposes an extended approach to handle properties with local variables. The variables are used to store data values which will be referenced later at certain TLM events. By this, data integrity can be formally verified. A technique to improve the efficiency by avoiding the need to consider overlapping scenarios is included. Preliminary results obtained by applying the proposed approach to a design from the OSCI SystemC distribution are presented.