Accellera Announces IEEE 1666™-2023 Standard Available Through IEEE GET Program

Elk Grove, Calif., November 9, 2023 -- Accellera Systems Initiative (Accellera), the electronics industry organization focused on the creation and adoption of electronic design automation (EDA) and intellectual property (IP) standards, announced today that the recently published IEEE 1666™-2023 Standard for SystemC Language Reference Manual (LRM) is now available for free download, courtesy of Accellera as part of the IEEE GET Program.

"Our close partnership with the IEEE Standards Association is a tremendous benefit to design and verification engineers around the globe,” stated Lu Dai, Accellera Chair. “SystemC has been in use for more than two decades, and as the standard is revised Accellera will continue to leverage its relationship to provide SystemC and other much-needed standards to the community fee-free.”

SystemC addresses the need for a system design and verification language that spans hardware and software. It is a language built in standard C++ by extending the language with the use of class libraries. The language is widely used for Digital Twins in the semiconductor space, allowing early embedded software development and effective hardware/software codesign.

“The 2023 revision builds on enhancements and new features contributed by the SystemC community during the last decade,” stated Jerome Cornet, IEEE 1666™ Working Group Chair. “More than fifty topics in over ten categories have been considered by the working group. This revision provides a new C++ baseline leveraging a mature ISO C++ version, numerous enhancements, and key new capabilities, notably for communicating with other simulations, such as simulation stage callbacks or the suspend mechanism.”

SystemC is also particularly suited to model the partitioning of systems, to evaluate and verify the assignment of blocks to either hardware or software implementation, and to architect and measure the interactions between and among functional blocks. Leading companies in the intellectual property (IP), electronic design automation (EDA), semiconductor, electronic systems, and embedded software industries currently use SystemC for hardware/software co-design and virtual platforms, architectural exploration, and to deliver high-performance hardware blocks at various levels of abstraction. SystemC was developed by the Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI) and Accellera and continues to be ratified by Accellera.

For more information about SystemC, including a list of resources and upcoming events, visit the SystemC Community Portal. SystemC Evolution Day, a full day workshop on the evolution of SystemC standards, will be held November 16 in Munich, Germany. For more information and to register, visit here.

The IEEE GET Program was established in 2010 to provide pre-paid access of selected standards to engineers and designers worldwide at no cost. The program helps expand the global reach of technical knowledge developed by industry, accelerates standards adoption, and contributes to an open knowledge community and the fostering of innovation. As a partner in the GET Program since its inception, Accellera has sponsored more than 175,000 downloads of Accellera-developed standards. For a list of Accellera and IEEE standards available for download at no cost, visit the Accellera Downloads page.

About Accellera

Accellera Systems Initiative is an independent, not-for-profit organization dedicated to create, support, promote, and advance system-level design, modeling, and verification standards for use by the worldwide electronics industry. The organization accelerates standards development and, as part of its ongoing collaboration with the IEEE, its standards are contributed to the IEEE Standards Association for formal standardization and ongoing change control. For more information, please visit www.accellera.org. Find out more about membership.