Thought Leadership

SystemC Day Videos from DVCon Available Now

By Dennis Brophy

Noted EDA analyst and guru Gary Smith delivered keynote address: “ESL: Where We Are and Where We’re Going”

OSCI sponsored the first annual SystemC Day at DVCon 2010.  The presentations were video recorded and are available for free for those who missed DVCon or who may wish to see them again.  Gary Smith’s presentation (registration required) and OSCI chair, Eric Lish’s OSCI Update lead the video set from SystemC Day.

The 12th North American SystemC Users Group (NASCUG) meeting was part of SystemC Day at DVCon and featured technical presentations on architectural modeling, verification, and analog/mixed-signal design using SystemC.

OSCI ON YOUTUBE: More videos of users and their perspectives on SystemC events and activities can be found via the OSCI channel on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/officialsystemc

Click here for completing listing of the following technical presentations.

The Metaport: A Technique for Managing Code Complexity
Jack Donovan, HighIP Design, Texas, USA

The metaport is a coding style that can effectively manage code complexity for complex ESL models, especially models that are intended for high-level synthesis. This presentation will give an overview of the metaport concept and dive into the details of a possible implementation.

OCP Socket Modeling with TLM-2.0
Hervé Alexanian, Sonics Inc., California, USA

This presentation discusses work performed by the OCP-IP Committee, specifically modeling that OCP built upon the TLM-2.0 standard.

ADL Synthesis using ArchC
Samuel Goto, Master student at UNICAMP

The design and implementation of processors is a complex task. Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) were created to extend existing HDLs, to ease the process of developing and prototyping an architecture by providing a set of tools and algorithms to optimize and automate some of the tedious parts. While much has been done on the specification and business levels of ADLs, there is a huge gap between ADL specifications/simulators and real life processors written in RTL. This project addresses the issues of bringing an ADL description to the RTL level, and reports the development of an extension of ArchC to support this level.

Look Ma, No Clocks! Improving Model Performance
David Black, XtremeEDA, Texas, USA

This tutorial-style presentation illustrates some techniques to avoid the inclusion of clocks in SystemC simulations and provide results of simple experiments showing the simulation performance benefits. Concepts discussed include synchronization, clock-free timers, and the effects of clocks on performance. A proposal is made for a simple SystemC class that can simplify coding when clocks are thought to be needed.

TLM-driven Design and Verification Methodology
Brian Bailey, independent consultant

SystemC is well on the road to adoption in a number of areas within the Electronic System Level (ESL) space, but many of those are separated islands today. Virtual Prototyping has seen a huge leap forward with the standardization of TLM 2.0. SystemC is also being used successfully for high-level synthesis at the module level, but to make SystemC pervasive, there must be a link between the applications. In addition, to reap the maximum productivity gains from a migration to a higher-level of abstraction, the verification methodology must also change in significant ways. In this presentation we will explore a new TLM-driven design and verification methodology that is being developed within Cadence, critiqued by their customers and documented in a book, which will be released over a number of months as pieces of it mature.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/verificationhorizons/2010/04/22/systemc-day-dvcon-2010/