Separation of communication and computation in SystemC/TLM modeling: A Feature-Oriented approach

Separation of Concern is a fundamental principle of software engineering. Considering that SystemC/TLM models are in fact software programs that simulating hardware behavior, this principal should also be followed in SystemC/TLM modeling and one of its applications is the Separation of Communication and Computation (CC separation). However, plenty of existing SystemC/TLM models haven´t actually separated CC, thus caused much redundant developing effort when changing their computation model or communication protocol. In this paper, we propose to use Feature-Oriented Programming (FOP) methodology to separate CC in SystemC/TLM modeling, and compare it with Object-Oriented approaches. The comparison shows the advantages of our Feature-Oriented approach.