From Requirements and Scenarios to ESL Design in SystemC

In the ESL design flow, the crucial task of developing a golden model that correctly implements the natural-language top-level specification has received little attention so far. The major drawback of the current practice is the isolation of design and verification. Motivated by this and the recent advance of verification techniques for SystemC ESL models, we propose a novel methodology to develop a correct SystemC golden model from the top-level specification. The proposed methodology is driven by the requirements and the scenarios in the specification with design and verification going hand in hand. An early formalization of requirements and scenarios produces a set of properties and a testbench together with a code skeleton that will be successively extended to a full SystemC ESL model. The availability of properties and a testbench beforehand enables verification-driven development of the model. The advantages of the methodology are discussed and demonstrated by a case study.