From Synchronous Guarded Actions to SystemC.
Jens Brandt, Mike Gemünde, Klaus Schneider · MBMV · 2010
In this paper, we present an automatic translation from synchronous guarded actions to SystemC. Synchronous guarded actions are often used as intermediate code representation of synchronous languages like Esterel and Quartz. The obtained SystemC modules can be seamlessly integrated into existing simulation environments, e. g. for fast simulation or the generation of virtual hardware prototypes. Since synchronous guarded actions may contain causality cycles (if actions have an immediate effect on their guards), we must generate a dynamic schedule for the SystemC modules in order to preserve the original semantics of the guarded actions. We implemented the translation procedure within our Averest framework and validated it by several benchmarks that contain difficult causality cycles or reincarnations of local variables.