ntrospective-SystemC: Reflection and Introspection in System Level Design

Reflection is an increasingly important feature in software systems as evidenced by introduction of datatype reflection abilities in Java, RTTI runtime type information reflection package for C++, and reflection service in .NET environment. Since systems being designed today are supposed to self-configure, self-heal and make a lot more intelligent decisions about itself, including versioning, fault-repair etc., reflection, and introspection are important. System Level Design (SLDs) languages such as SystemC are used for modeling software/hardware systems, validating such models, measuring performance, visualizing various aspects for debugging etc. Therefore, introspection and/or reflection capabilities for SystemC and other SLDs can be of great use, for automated reconfiguration for fast design alternatives exploration, automated test generation and coverage analysis, for visualization of signal activities, hot-spots analysis and so on. In this paper, we describe in detail how certain public domain XML based tools may be used to provide structural reflection for SystemC, and how to enhance this reflection into a service, which can also interact with the SystemC models under simulation to reflect useful runtime information as well. Ability for SystemC to query such reflection renders introspection feature to SystemC. We show through some application examples the utility of SystemC reflection and introspection. I ntrospective-SystemC: Reflection and Introspection in System Level Design Hiren D. Patel, Deepak A. Mathaikutty, David Berner and Sandeep K. Shukla { hiren, damathai, shukla}@vt.edu, [email protected]