Modelling Program-State Machines in SystemC™

The Program-State Machine (PSM) unifies the concepts of hierarchical concurrent finite-state machines, dataflow graphs and imperative programming languages in a single model of computation. It is used as the foundation of the SpecC System Level Design Language. This paper demonstrates the obstacles and proposes an implementation of the PSM model of computation using SystemC. It is shown that this implementation overcomes some fundamental obstacles when using SystemC for System Level Design. Furthermore, we show the applicability of our PSM implementation by porting a JPEG encoder design originally implemented in SpecC. A comparison of model execution time is very promising and shows that our proposed approach is competitive with a native SpecC model execution.