From TLM to FPGA: rapid prototyping with SystemC and transaction level modeling

We describe a communication-centric design methodology with SystemC that allows for efficient FPGA prototype generation of transaction level models (TLM). Using a framework comprising of well-defined communication protocols and synthesizable communication wrappers, the process of refining the TLM specification of a HW/SW system to its synthesizable implementation can be systematically automated. We look at how to map the TLM communication channels of both HW and SW components to virtually any target platform and illustrate our approach on refining an example HW/SW system from its TLM specification to a Virtex-II Pro FPGA implementation