SystemC Notes

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: RTL is synthesised from from SystemC source code using a so-called `C-to-gates' compiler.