Advanced features for industry-level logging and tracing of C-based designs

In this paper, we introduce advanced features of an industry-level logging and tracing framework for C-based designs. The developed framework requires only minimal changes of the original source code and supports many powerful features, such as the backtracking of simulation data. By completely redesigning the configuration and log data handling mechanisms, it provides now sufficient functionality and flexibility to face sophisticated industry-level requirements. The logging and tracing functionalities are integrated by implementing through the application of the unitized technique. The output and handling of the log data are performed by separate OS threads or even on other machines, so that the execution is effected only minimally. This allows to exploit multi core host architectures even for SystemC designs, as the native sc_trace() logging functionality only takes advantage of a single OS thread. Furthermore, the framework also supports the logging and tracing of advanced SystemC TLM2.0 models under consideration of the temporal decounling characteristics.