Checking temporal properties in SystemC specifications

Today's system designs consist of multiple architectural components, software as well as hardware. The ability to specify and verify these systems at a high level of abstraction is a key competence to cope with the increasing design complexity. C/C++ based approaches on system specification and design are becoming more and more important. They provide a common platform for system designers, hardware and software engineers, and allow a high-performant simulation of system's behavior during the whole design process. The leading approach for C++ based system specification is SystemC which is on the step of becoming a de facto standard in industrial system-level design. Generally, within SystemC the testbench of a design will also be specified in SystemC, which results in a tight coupling of the design and the corresponding test environment. On the other hand, only rudimentary testbench support is given in SystemC and sophisticated features of today's testbench environments are missing. The checking of temporal properties is one of the core requirements in the area of functional verification and is not supported by the standard SystemC language. This paper addresses that important problem. It shows strategies for checking temporal properties in a SystemC design in terms of an easy-to-understand application, a traffic light controller.