Moving to SystemC TLM for design and verification of digital hardware

Stuart Swan, Qiang Zhu, Xingri Li, Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
EETimes (5/13/2013 9:35 AM EDT)

Design and verification of new digital hardware blocks is becoming increasingly challenging. Today, designers are confronted with a host of issues, including growing design and verification complexity, time-to-market pressures, power goals, and evolving design specifications.

To tackle these challenges, customers are beginning to make a significant change in design methodology, by moving to SystemC transaction-level models (TLM) as the design entry point, and by leveraging high-level synthesis (HLS) in combination with IP reuse. This article presents our experience in working with Fujitsu Semiconductor Ltd. to adopt this new methodology using Cadence® C-to-Silicon Compiler on a data access controller design, and presents the very promising results they reported at a recent C-to-Silicon user group meeting in Japan. The selection of the design, modeling work, and results analysis described in this paper were performed by Fujitsu Semiconductor with some assistance from Cadence.

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