Automatic Conversion of Simulink Models to SysteMoC Actor Networks

Abstract

Simulink has gained a lot of acceptance due to its intuitive through block-based algorithm design, simulation, and rapid prototyping capabilities for signal processing as well as control applications. However, automatic code generation for heterogeneous architectures is currently not supported by Simulink. In the literature, there exist automatic translation toolchains for generation of C or C++ code from Simulink models, which then are used for implementation or validation purposes. But few of them approach the generation of models that can be used in well-established Electronic System Level (ESL) design methodologies and tools. In order to address this issue, we present a methodology to extract an executable specification based on Data Flow Graphs (DFGs) from a given Simulink model. Such a specification can then be used by ESL tools to perform a Design Space Exploration (DSE) and generate code for hardware/software partitions directly from the ESL model. In a case study from signal processing, we validate the equivalence of the results of the simulation in Simulink and the results obtained by simulation of the DFG fully automatically generated from the Simulink model in the SystemC-based actor language SysteMoC.