Systemc-clang: An open-source framework for analyzing mixed-abstraction SystemC models

This work presents an open-source framework called systemc-clang for analyzing SystemC models that consist of a mixture of register-transfer level, and transaction-level components. The framework statically parses mixed-abstraction SystemC models, and represents them using an intermediate representation. This intermediate representation captures the structural information about the model, and certain behavioural semantics of the processes in the model. This representation can be used for multiple purposes such as static analysis of the model, code transformations, and optimizations. We describe with examples, the key details in implementing systemc-clang, and show an example of constructing a plugin that analyzes the intermediate representation to discover opportunities for parallel execution of SystemC processes. We also experimentally evaluate the capabilities of this framework with a subset of examples from the SystemC distribution including register-transfer, and transaction-level models.