SystemC is the de facto standard for modeling embedded systems. It allows system design at various levels of ab- stractions, provides typical object-orientation features and incorporates timing and concurrency concepts. A SystemC program is typically processed by a SystemC front-end in order to verify, debug and/or optimize the architecture. De- signing a SystemC front-end is a difficult task and existing approaches suffer from limitations. In this paper, we present a new approach that addresses most of these limitations. We detail this approach, based on an executable intermediate representation. We introduce PinaVM, a new, open-source SystemC front-end and implementation of our contributions. We give experimental results on this tool.