Improving SystemC simulation through Petri net reductions

With the growing acceptance of SystemC in co-design environments there is a need to further improve the simulation performance of complex designs. Our previous work has shown that simulation performance can be improved by carefully restructuring such designs. As a well known formal model for concurrent systems with a good balance between their expressive power and the theoretical results available for correlating structural properties with behavior, free-choice Petri nets were an ideal candidate for formalizing our restructuring technique. To do so we show how SystemC code can be mapped onto such nets followed by how such a labeled net can be reduced in a semantics preserving way. The end result is a restructured design which, as our experiments show, has improved simulation performance over the original models.