Automatic RTL test generation from SystemC TLM specifications

SystemC transaction-level modeling (TLM) is widely used to enable early exploration for both hardware and software designs. It can reduce the overall design and validation effort of complex system-on-chip (SOC) architectures. However, due to lack of automated techniques coupled with limited reuse of validation efforts between abstraction levels, SOC validation is becoming a major bottleneck. This article presents a novel top-down methodology for automatically generating register transfer-level (RTL) tests from SystemC TLM specifications. It makes two important contributions: i) it proposes a method that can automatically generate TLM tests using various coverage metrics, and (ii) it develops a test refinement specification for automatically converting TLM tests to RTL tests in order to reduce overall validation effort. We have developed a tool which incorporates these activities to enable automated RTL test generation from SystemC TLM specifications. Case studies using a router example and a 64-bit Alpha AXP pipelined processor demonstrate that our approach can achieve intended functional coverage of the RTL designs, as well as capture various functional errors and inconsistencies between specifications and implementations.