The ESL Design Methodology

So called Electronic System Level (ESL) design is a methodology now being widely adopted for the design of systems on a chip. Design automation software from the 70's and 80's modelled communication with a shared variable for each net in the chip. In ESL, high-level models of hardware subsystems are written in C++ (using SystemC) and communication is modelled using subroutine calls and dynamic binding (DLLs). Machine readable specifications of the interface protocols allows automated synthesis of monitors, glue-logic and `transactors'. I will give a tutorial on this methodology.