SystemC Evolution Fika: Parallel SystemC

The SystemC Evolution Fika on April 7 had threading/parallelism as its theme. There were four speakers who presented various angles on how to parallelize SystemC models. The presentations and following discussion provided a variety of perspectives on threading as it can be applied in virtual platforms and other computer architecture simulations. It was pretty clear that the presenters and audience had quite different ideas about just what the target domain looks like and the best way to introduce parallelism to SystemC. Here is my take on what was said.

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DRAMsys – Cycle-Accurate Simulation using Transactions

DRAMsys is a simulator for modern RAM systems, built by researchers at Fraunhofer IESE and the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern. Over the past few years, I have heard several talks about the tool and also had the luck to talk a bit to the team behind it.  It is an interesting piece of simulation technology, in particular for how it manages to build a truly cycle-accurate model on top of the approximately-timed (AT) style defined SystemC TLM-2.0.

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The TLM DAC

46daclogoThe past few days here at DAC, a big theme has been transaction level modeling (TLM).

TLM is often considered to be SystemC TLM-2.0. Most of the statements from the EDA companies are to the effect that SystemC TLM-2.0 solves the problem of combining models from different sources. Scratching the surface of this happy picture, it is clear that it is not that simple…

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Is SoC (was: ESL) all there is to virtual platforms?

SystemC TLM-2.0 has just been released, and on the heels of that everyone in the EDA world is announcing various varieties of support. TLM-2.0-compliant models, tools that can run TLM-2.0 models, and existing modeling frameworks that are being updated to comply with the TLM-2.0 standard. All of this feeds a general feeling that the so-called Electronic System Level design market (according to Frank Schirrmeister of Synopsys, the term was coined by Gary Smith) is finally reaching a level of maturity where there is hope to grow the market by standards. This is something that has to happen, but it seems to be getting hijacked by a certain part of the market addressing the needs of a certain set of users.

There is more to virtual platforms than ESL. Much more. Remember the pure software people.

Edit: Maybe it is more correct to say “there is more to virtual platforms than SoC”, as that is what several very smart comments to this post has said. ESL is not necessarily tied to SoC, it is in theory at least a broader term. But currently, most tools retain an SoC focus.

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