TLM.open: a SystemC/TLM Frontend for the CADP Verification Toolbox

The development of embedded systems starts more and more by the design of abstract models written in SystemC/TLM [18, 6]. These models allow the simulation of the embedded software before the hardware RTL descriptions are available, and are used as golden models for hardware verification. The verification of the SystemC/TLM models is an important issue, since a error in the model can mislead the system designers, or reveal an error in the specification. The OSCI provides an open-source simulator for SystemC/TLM and a library SCV to ease test generation. However, the OSCI does not provide tools for formal verification. Moreover, while the SystemC specification allows many schedulings for a given test case, the OSCI simulator exhibits always the same scheduling. Thus, even if an execution leads to the expected result, another execution with a different scheduling may be erroneous. To find this kind of bugs, many publications have experimented the use of model checking In order to apply model checking to a SystemC/TLM program, the usual approach relies on the translation of the SystemC/TLM code to a formal language for which a model checker is available. Defining and implementing this kind of translation is a difficult task because SystemC/TLM programs can contain arbitrary C++ code. We propose another approach that suppress the translation effort. Basically, an explicit model checker (e.g., CADP) must be able to execute transitions and to store states. Given a SystemC/TLM program, we execute the transitions using g++ and the OSCI library, and we ask the user to provide additional functions to store the current program state. These additional functions represent generally less than 20% of the size of the origianl model, and allows to apply all CADP tools to the SystemC/TLM program itself. The remainder of this abstract is organized as follows. Section 2 gives an overview of the previous works. Section 3 presents the existing CADP toolbox and next describes the new TLM.open front-end. The features and performances of TLM.open are evaluated in section 4. Section 5 concludes this abstract.