For Virtual Prototypers …

By this time, users/readers would have already appreciating the differences b/w Simulator(s) and Emulator(s). If not, please refer to my startup page on ‘Eda - My Perspective’ and the slide deck to start off with.

Well, there are lots of simulators available in the market that help user simulate various designs from the conceptualization stage itself. These could be the analog designs, digital designs or mix from both-worlds. Currently, the industry is rapid paces towards performing ‘System-Level Simulations’.

There are various commercial tools available with EDA companies. But they all are proprietary. Thanks to the academicians, reasearch scholars, research and development units across globe, there are already few open and free-to-use virtual prototyping solutions, such as GEM5, Qemu, etcetera.

Why SystemC ?

While tHe above mentioned simulators are driven by open-source communities alone (unsure about any significant contributions done by any of the EDA companies), SystemC is an Accellera-backed solution targetting virtual-prototyping.

SystemC, earlier OSCI-SystemC, now Accellera-SystemC is an IEEE approved standard. It is formed out of the contributions made by the member companies of the Accellera Consortium which mostly semi-conductor and EDA companies are part off.

Hence, learning SystemC would enable virtual prototyping engineers to integrate the SystemC solutions with other toolsets offered by the EDA companies. This also leads us to perform co-simulations which shall be a topic of my some-other post later.

What’s in For You ?

I’ll try present some on-hands learning labs that enable you build and run few demonstrations. They would be targetting different aspects of the simulation kernel. The thought is that they all contribute to learning SystemC kernel incrementally. Understanding the presented samples should enable users to explore SystemC kernel on his/her own in greater details.

Get Started …

You might want to start with Learn-SystemC Sessions