Towards a Unified Execution Model for Transactions in TLM

Even though transaction level modeling (TLM) with SystemC is widely being used and despite the existence of several formal models for TLM, there is no generally accepted definition of what a transaction is and how exactly to define transaction level modeling. The key contribution of this paper is the analysis of TLM characteristics and a definition of transactions resulting in better analyzability of TLMs. For this purpose, transactions are restricted to the ACID properties (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) known from database systems. Based on these results, a finite state machine model well suited for formal analysis was proposed along with an implementation of the basic concepts in SystemC.