An ESL Environment for Modeling Electrical Interconnect Faults

This paper focuses on an ESL integrated environment for modeling communication channels at an abstract level and providing a mechanism for insertion of interconnect electrical faults into the channels for coverage analysis. The channels are designed for abstract initiator-target communications and have a general format that contains properties found in SystemC, TLM-1 and TLM-2.0 channels. This paper presents a relatively complex SystemC channel and shows how our suggested mechanism for crosstalk fault modeling can be inserted into the communication lines of the channel. Crosstalk models examined here are 1) at an abstract aggressor-victim level described by programming a SystemC channel, and 2) at the electrical level using SystemC-AMS. Results show correspondence of crosstalk faults at the two levels, and at the same time much faster simulations for the former.