Automatic generation of transaction level models for rapid design space exploration

Transaction-level modeling has been touted to improve simulation performance and modeling efficiency for early design space exploration. But no tools are available to generate such transaction-level models from abstract input descriptions. Designers have to write such models manually, which is a tedious and error-prone task, and one of bottlenecks in improving designer's productivity. In this paper, we propose a method to generate transaction-level models from virtual architecture models where components communicate via abstract message-passing channels. We have applied our approach to a set of industrial-strength examples with a wide range of target architectures. Experimental results show that significant productivity gains can be achieved, demonstrating the effectiveness and benefits of our approach for rapid, early exploration of communication design space.