IP Cannot be an Efficient Abstraction Level Without SystemC!

By _Cadence Blog

August 15, 2011

EDN recently featured a lengthy article entitled "SOCs: IP is the new abstraction. Reusable IP, not system-level language, has become the new level of abstraction."

The point of view is that SoC design now is such a large undertaking that the best way to efficiently design one is to assemble IP from various sources into a platform, differentiate with software, and swap in different IP for derivative designs that target different requirements.

It all makes sense. However, where it goes wrong is in saying that SystemC has not delivered the next level of abstraction after RTL. This IP re-use and assembly vision does not work very efficiently unless the IP is developed in SystemC transaction-level modeling (TLM). Designing blocks in RTL would work in this vision, but it would be very inefficient, blunting many of the benefits. This is why many corporate design re-use initiatives have stalled, because of the significant amount of overhead required to re-use RTL.

To read the full article, click here