Hardware/Software Co-Visualization on the Electronic System Level Using SystemC

Hardware design is increasingly shifted towards higher abstraction levels to cope with the complexity of modern systems. For this purpose, the concept of Hardware/Software Co-Design has been established. Systems are implemented in high-level languages such as C++ or SystemC, providing an executable prototype without requiring designers to decide in an early stage on whether features should be implemented in hardware or software. For these, just like for pure hardware or software systems, design understanding remains crucial. Hardware/Software Co-Visualization (HSCV) is a concept that has recently been proposed to assist developers in communicating features of their design. Especially for visualizations, designers need to be able to quickly generate the underlying data and the resulting visual representation. This paper illustrates the current state of HSCV and proposes a methodology to harmonize the visualization data being generated from Electronic System Level designs written in SystemC.