Automatic Generation of Thread Communication Graphs from SystemC Source Code

In an ideal top-down system design flow, graphical diagrams are designed before an executable specification in a System Level Description Language (SLDL) is derived. Such initial charts typically also serve as visual documentation of the textual specification and aid in maintaining the model. In the absence of graphical charts, e.g. in case of legacy or 3rd party code, a textual SLDL model is hard to comprehend for any unfamiliar designer. Here, we propose to automatically extract graphical charts from given SystemC code to ease the understanding of the source code with a visual representation. Specifically, we extract the communication flow between the threads from the design model by use of an automatic SystemC compiler infrastructure that statically analyzes the code and generates custom Thread Communication Graphs (TCG) similar to message sequence charts. Our experimental results on embedded applications demonstrate that our novel static analysis can quickly extract accurate TCG that are highly useful for designers in becoming familiar with new source code.