Simulation-based equivalence checking between SystemC models at different levels of abstraction

Today for System-on-Chips (SoCs) companies Electronic System Level(ESL) design is the established approach. Abstraction and standardized communication interfaces based on SystemC Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) have become the core component for ESL design. The abstract models in ESL flows are stepwise refined down to hardware. In this context verification is the major bottleneck: After each refinement step the resulting model is simulated again with the same testbench. The simulation results have to be compared to the previous results to check the functional equivalence of both models. For models at lower levels of abstraction strong approaches exist to formally prove equivalence. However, this is not possible here due to the TLM abstraction. Hence, in practice equivalence checking in ESL flows is based on simulation. Since implementing the necessary verification environment requires a huge effort, we propose an equivalence checking framework in this paper. Our framework allows to easily compare variable accesses in different SystemC models. Therefore, the two models are co-simulated using a client-server architecture. In combination with multi-threading our approach is very efficient as shown by the experiments. In addition, the time required for debugging is reduced by the framework since the respective source code references where the variable accesses did not match are presented to the user.