Electronic system design has been slowly migrating to higher level languages such as SystemC for more than a decade now. SystemC is an open source C++ library that has emerged as a standard for high-level design and system modeling. Writing code in SystemC has several advantages which I won’t elaborate on in this article, though… Read More
This year for the first time the Thursday of DAC is tranining day. So that would be June 6th in Austin, of course. There are four tracks of training focused on SystemC, ARM Cortex and two on SystemVerilog, all areas of increasing use in SoC design, especially in mobile.
Each track of training is divided into two parts, one held from 9am… Read More
Often a question is raised about how SystemC improves verification time when the design has to go through RTL in any case. A simple answer is that with SystemC, designs can be described at a higher level of abstraction and then automatically synthesized to RTL. When the hands-on design and verification activity is at a higher level,… Read More
Unless you are a small company with one design team, the chance you have standardized on one FPGA vendor for all your needs, forever and ever, is unlikely. No doubt you probably have a favorite, because of the specific class of part you use most often or the tool you are most familiar with, but I’d bet you use more than one FPGA vendor routinely.… Read More
Many advanced algorithmic IPs are described in C++. We use this language because of its flexibility. Of course software algorithms are written to be executed on processors so they don’t solve all the issues of getting the algorithm implemented in hardware directly. This is not simply a high-level synthesis (HLS) issue. Usually… Read More
Promoted by Accellera, SystemC User Groups are in work worldwide; NASCUGin North America, ESCUGin Europe and ISCUG in India. While I was shuffling between my day-to-day work and strategy management course/exams, I received an invitation from my long time colleague, President and CEO of Circuitsutra Technologies, Mr. Umesh… Read More
Tom Feist of Xilinx presented here at the GlobalPress Electronics Summit about their strategy to take design abstraction up another level. In the SoC world, we are still pretty much stuck at the RTL level and have moved to higher abstractions by using an IP strategy. But at least all IC designers are RTL-literate.
Xilinx, in the Vivado… Read More
Mentor Graphics will be all over DVCon next week (February 25-28) at the DoubleTree hotel in San Jose.
In addition to attending all the panels, tutorials, posters, and the keynote, you can visit Mentor in booth 901 on the exhibit floor.
Here’s the lineup of Mentor-related events:… Read More
One of the decisions that needs to be made when using high-level synthesis (HLS) in general and Catapult in particular is what language to use as input. The choice is C++ or SystemC. Of course at some level SystemC is C++ with added libraries and templates, but in fact the semantics of the two languages end up being very different.
The… Read More
The Accellera Systems Initiative, most well-known for driving the standardization of various aspects of Verilog and SystemVerilog before handing the standards off to the IEEE, has announced that nominations are open for the 2013 Technical Excellence Award. This recognizes outstanding contributions in the creation of EDA… Read More
