It's history, overview, and how to use SystemC on the PWF.

SystemC is a free library for C++ for hardware SoC modelling. »Download from www.systemc.org

It can be used for detailed net-level modelling, but today its main uses are :

• Architectural exploration: Making a fast and quick, high-level model of a SoC to explore performance variation against various dimensions, such as bus width and cache memory size.
• Transactional level (TLM) models of systems, where handshaking protocols between components using hardware nets are replaced with subroutine calls between higher-level models of those components.
• Synthesis : some companies are generated their RTL from SystemC designs with a generation of so-called C-to-gates compilers.

SystemC was developed over the last ten years. There have been two major releases, 1.0 and 2.0. Also of importance is the recent release of the add-on TLM library, TLM 2.0.

Everything can be downloaded from »www.systemc.org