SystemAda

Abstract

Recent research on system level design has produced a new level of abstraction for description of hardware that is referred to as Transaction Level Modeling, or TLM. TLM separates hardware into computation and communication units and describes each at a very abstract level. Another important property of electronic circuits, which is also modeled well in TLM, is concurrency of tasks and operations. Inherent concurrency of Ada, makes this language a good candidate for design and description of modern electronic systems. This paper* describes how to use. Ada as a system description language like SystemC, and will use Ada compilers (such as Gnat) to evaluate systems described using Ada. We refer to the adaptation of Ada for system level description as SystemAda. This paper reviews Ada programming language requirements for modeling behavior of a digital system at transaction level, and considers possible approaches for extending Ada to meet these requirements.