A Flexible, Syntax Independent Representation (SIR) for System Level Design Models

System level design (SLD) is widely seen as a solution for bridging the gap between chip complexity and design productivity of systems on chip (SoC). SLD relieves the designer from detailed manual implementation by raising the level of abstraction in design models. There are many different modeling approaches to SLD. With the abundance of design languages and supporting tools, a designer can create a multitude of models of the same system that are difficult to compare and evaluate against each other. Also, it is not unusual for the same system model to comply to specification guidelines in one simulation tool, and exceed them in another. This paper presents an approach to circumvent this problem by describing a design model using a syntax independent representation (SIR). Such representation of the model complies to modeling guidelines shared by various SLD languages but is not restricted by their syntactic compositions. Further, the same structure can represent models on different levels of abstraction. Our multidimensional and multipurpose SIR structure can be projected onto planes of modeling languages including SpecC and SystemC, as demonstrated by experimental results shown in this work