Building SystemC waiting state automata

SystemC is becoming a de facto standard for the system-level description of system-on-chip. However most formal verification techniques used for verifying hardware components targets low level design, usually netlist or RTL, but time-to-market requirements have rushed the industry towards design paradigms that offer a very high level of abstraction. In previous works, we proposed a verification methodology based on SystemC waiting-state automata, an abstract formal model for verifying properties of SystemC at the transaction level within a delta-cycle. The main drawback of thismodel is that it should be providedmanually. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically build the SystemC waiting-state automata from the SystemC code. It is based on an extended symbolic execution of the SystemC design that takes care of synchronous as well as asynchronous communications and that preserves the semantics of SystemC up to a delta-cycle.