Speeding Up SystemC Simulation through Process Splitting

This paper presents a new approach that can be used to speed up SystemC simulations by automatically optimizing the model for simulation. The work addresses the inefficiency of the standard SystemC scheduler that may lead in some situations to unnecessary wake-up calls, as well as unnecessary code execution. The method presented analyzes the SystemC code to automatically extract signal dependencies based on a set of rules. This information is then used to split large processes into smaller ones. Process splitting is performed by a tool -SplitPro- which generates an optimized code that can be run on any standard SystemC engine. SplitPro was used to analyze the description of an Alpha super scalar processor and optimize some of its modules. A speed gain of up to 23% in simulation time was achieved over a number of split processes