Interactive Model-Based Compilation Continued - Incremental Hardware Synthesis for SCCharts

The Single-Pass Language-Driven Incremental Compilation (SLIC) strategy uses a series of model-to-model (M2M) transformations to compile a model or program to a specified target. Tool developer and modeler can inspect the result of each transformation step, using a familiar, graphical syntax of the successively transformed model, which is made possible by harnessing automatic layout. Previous work (presented at ISoLA’14) introduced the basics of the SLIC approach and illustrated it with a compiler that translated SCCharts, a synchronous, deterministic statechart language developed for safety-critical systems, to software. The compiler is implemented in the Kiel Integrated Environment for Layout Eclipse Rich Client (KIELER), an open-source development framework based on Eclipse. This paper proposes two extensions to SLIC. First, we extend the M2M transformation mechanism with a tracing capability that keeps track of model elements during transformations. Second, we make use of the tracing capability for an interactive simulation, where we not only observe a model’s input/output behavior during execution, but can inspect the run-time behavior of each model component, at any transformation stage. We illustrate these concepts by new transformations in the KIELER SCCharts compiler, which allow to synthesize hardware circuits, and a simulator that executes an intermediate-level software model and visualizes the simulation at the high-level model as well as the low-level circuit.