Language Extensions to SystemC: Process Control Constructs

The SystemC language has established itself as a popular choice for both modeling and verification at the system level. A well known deficiency in SystemC is the lack of process control constructs - e.g., suspend-resume, kill, reset - that are necessary in many applications domains. This paper identifies and describes a fundamental set of general purpose SystemC kernel extensions that fulfills this deficiency. Effective application of our language extensions are demonstrated in testbench and abstract hardware modeling scenarios.