Book•
System Design with SystemC
31 May 2002-
TL;DR: System Design and SystemC provides a comprehensive introduction to the powerful modeling capabilities of the SystemC language, and also provides a large and valuable set of system level modeling examples and techniques.
Abstract: The emergence of the system-on-chip (SoC) era is creating many new challenges at all stages of the design process. Engineers are reconsidering how designs are specified, partitioned and verified. With systems and software engineers programming in C/C++ and their hardware counterparts working in hardware description languages such as VHDL and Verilog, problems arise from the use of different design languages, incompatible tools and fragmented tool flows. Momentum is building behind the SystemC language and modeling platform as the best solution for representing functionality, communication, and software and hardware implementations at various levels of abstraction. The reason is clear: increasing design complexity demands very fast executable specifications to validate system concepts, and only C/C++ delivers adequate levels of abstraction, hardware-software integration, and performance. System design today also demands a single common language and modeling foundation in order to make interoperable system--level design tools, services and intellectual property a reality. SystemC is entirely based on C/C++ and the complete source code for the SystemC reference simulator can be freely downloaded from www.systemc.org and executed on both PCs and workstations. System Design and SystemC provides a comprehensive introduction to the powerful modeling capabilities of the SystemC language, and also provides a large and valuable set of system level modeling examples and techniques. Written by experts from Cadence Design Systems, Inc. and Synopsys, Inc. who were deeply involved in the definition and implementation of the SystemC language and reference simulator, this book will provide you with the key concepts you need to be successful with SystemC. System Design with SystemC thoroughly covers the new system level modeling capabilities available in SystemC 2.0 as well as the hardware modeling capabilities available in earlier versions of SystemC. designed and implemented the SystemC language and reference simulator, this book will provide you with the key concepts you need to be successful with SystemC. System Design with SystemC will be of interest to designers in industry working on complex system designs, as well as students and researchers within academia. All of the examples and techniques described within this book can be used with freely available compilers and debuggers e no commercial software is needed. Instructions for obtaining the free source code for the examples obtained within this book are included in the first chapter.
Citations
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01 Oct 2003
TL;DR: A TLM taxonomy is introduced and the benefits of TLMs' use in the existing design domains, namely modeling, validation, refinement, exploration, and synthesis, is compared.
Abstract: Recently, the transaction-level modeling has been widely referred to in system-level design community. However, the transaction-level models (TLMs) are not well defined and the usage of TLMs in the existing design domains, namely modeling, validation, refinement, exploration, and synthesis, is not well coordinated. This paper introduces a TLM taxonomy and compares the benefits of TLMs' use.
611 citations
TL;DR: Based on a metamodel with formal semantics that developers can use to capture designs, Metropolis provides an environment for complex electronic-system design that supports simulation, formal analysis, and synthesis.
Abstract: Today, the design chain lacks adequate support, with most system-level designers using a collection of unlinked tools. The implementation then proceeds with informal techniques involving numerous human-language interactions that create unnecessary and unwanted iterations among groups of designers in different companies or different divisions. The move toward programmable platforms shifts the design implementation task toward embedded software design. When embedded software reaches the complexity typical of today's designs, the risk that the software will not function correctly increases exponentially. The Metropolis project seeks to develop a unified framework that can cope with this challenge. Based on a metamodel with formal semantics that developers can use to capture designs, Metropolis provides an environment for complex electronic-system design that supports simulation, formal analysis, and synthesis.
549 citations
Book•
02 Nov 2007
TL;DR: This book is intended as an introduction to the entire range of issues important to reconfigurable computing, using FPGAs as the context, or "computing vehicles" to implement this powerful technology.
Abstract: The main characteristic of Reconfigurable Computing is the presence of hardware that can be reconfigured to implement specific functionality more suitable for specially tailored hardware than on a simple uniprocessor. Reconfigurable computing systems join microprocessors and programmable hardware in order to take advantage of the combined strengths of hardware and software and have been used in applications ranging from embedded systems to high performance computing. Many of the fundamental theories have been identified and used by the Hardware/Software Co-Design research field. Although the same background ideas are shared in both areas, they have different goals and use different approaches.This book is intended as an introduction to the entire range of issues important to reconfigurable computing, using FPGAs as the context, or "computing vehicles" to implement this powerful technology. It will take a reader with a background in the basics of digital design and software programming and provide them with the knowledge needed to be an effective designer or researcher in this rapidly evolving field.
· Treatment of FPGAs as computing vehicles rather than glue-logic or ASIC substitutes
· Views of FPGA programming beyond Verilog/VHDL
· Broad set of case studies demonstrating how to use FPGAs in novel and efficient ways
531 citations
TL;DR: The Sesame framework as mentioned in this paper provides high-level modeling and simulation methods and tools for system-level performance evaluation and exploration of heterogeneous embedded systems, and it takes a designer systematically along the path from selecting candidate architectures, using analytical modeling and multi-objective optimization, to simulating these candidate architectures with our system level simulation environment.
Abstract: The sheer complexity of today's embedded systems forces designers to start with modeling and simulating system components and their interactions in the very early design stages. It is therefore imperative to have good tools for exploring a wide range of design choices, especially during the early design stages, where the design space is at its largest. This paper presents an overview of the Sesame framework, which provides high-level modeling and simulation methods and tools for system-level performance evaluation and exploration of heterogeneous embedded systems. More specifically, we describe Sesame's modeling methodology and trajectory. It takes a designer systematically along the path from selecting candidate architectures, using analytical modeling and multiobjective optimization, to simulating these candidate architectures with our system-level simulation environment. This simulation environment subsequently allows for architectural exploration at different levels of abstraction while maintaining high-level and architecture-independent application specifications. We illustrate all these aspects using a case study in which we traverse Sesame's exploration trajectory for a motion-JPEG encoder application.
366 citations
01 Jan 2007
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present the challenges faced by industry in system level design and propose a design methodology, platform-based design (PBD), that has the potential of addres- sing these challenges in a unified way.
Abstract: System-level design (SLD) is considered by many as the next frontier in electronic design automation (EDA). SLD means many things to different people since there is no wide agreement on a definition of the term. Academia, designers, and EDA experts have taken different avenues to attack the problem, for the most part springing from the basis of traditional EDA and trying to raise the level of abstraction at which integrated circuit designs are captured, analyzed, and synthesized from. However, my opinion is that this is just the tip of the iceberg of a much bigger problem that is common to all systemindustry. In particular, I believe that notwithstanding the obvious differences in the vertical industrial segments (for example, consumer, automotive, computing, and communica- tion), there is a common underlying basis that can be explored. This basis may yield a novel EDA industry and even a novel engineering field that could bring substantial productivity gains not only to the semiconductor industry but to all system industries including industrial and automotive, communication and computing, avionics and building automation, space and agriculture, and health and security, in short, a real technical renaissance. In this paper, I present the challenges faced by industry in system level design. Then, I propose a design methodology, platform-based design (PBD), that has the potential of addres- sing these challenges in a unified way. Further, I place methodology and tools available today in the PBD framework and present a tool environment, Metropolis, that supports PBD and that can be used to integrate available tools and methods together with two examples of its application to separate industrial domains.
331 citations