TLM protocol compliance checking at the Electronic System Level

Design and verification of embedded systems at the Electronic System Level (ESL) is common practice. In particular, Transaction Level Modeling (TLM) is the major reason for the success of ESL design. However, when detailed protocols are modeled at lower levels of TLM, the verification of the communication becomes a critical issue. In this paper, we present an approach for protocol compliance checking of new or detailed protocol implementations. They are checked against user-specified protocol sequences. We also analyze the protocol coverage achieved by the testbench and visualize the results on a protocol sequence graph. Experimental results for a SoC model demonstrate the advantages of our method.