Aspect-oriented design in systemC: implementation and applications

ABSTRACT

New programming languages paradigms have commonly been evaluated and eventually incorporated into hardware description languages. Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a new paradigm that provides new modularity constructs on top of object-oriented and structured languages such as Java, C++ and C.This paper presents and assesses possible applications of AOP in the context of integrated system design. More specifically, we apply AOP in applications developed using SystemC to model important system aspects such as metrics measure, communication and cache policy to demonstrate the benefits of this approach. The impact of this new approach in the simulation time of the applications is also discussed in the paper.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  B. Hardware
  B.7 INTEGRATED CIRCUITS
      B.7.2 Design Aids

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features

  J. Computer Applications
  J.6 COMPUTER-AIDED ENGINEERING
      Subjects: Computer-aided design (CAD)

General Terms:
Design, Languages

Keywords:
aspect-oriented programming, hardware description languages, systemC