Comprehensive Analysis of SystemC

System architects and designers in many companies are adopting the SystemC language for exploration, design tradeoff analysis and design creation. The 1Team®-System solution significantly streamlines the transition to SystemC. It reduces the SystemC learning curve, helping new SystemC users become proficient and productive, quickly and easily. At the same time, it enables experienced SystemC users to write better code.

The 1Team-System solution likewise reduces system implementation costs, ensuring that SystemC code accurately models system-level objectives. The 1Team-System solution applies Atrenta's proprietary predictive development technology to make sure that SystemC hardware designs are correct from the start: free of coding hazards, compliant with industry-standard and company-specific best practices and coded for optimal portability, maintainability and reuse.

The 1Team®-System solution represents a new level of SystemC analysis, more advanced than previous SystemC approaches. Unlike alternative solutions that address only syntax, The 1Team-System solution ensures total system accuracy across all levels of the design hierarchy. It validates structure, function, data organization and communication protocols. It promotes best practices, helping to further optimize code. In addition to its large library of built-in best practices, the 1Team-System solution is uniquely customizable, enabling companies to capture and automate their design expertise. For example, companies can create custom rules to protect their intellectual property rights, specifying that code has the proper headers and comment statements containing critical copyright information.

Any new language comes with a learning curve, but SystemC poses special challenges, since it combines software (C++) and hardware design expertise. These complexities can cause confusion between architects and designers and lead to lengthy debug cycles. The 1Team-System solution checks for proper semantics and promotes stylistic best practices, thus preventing coding errors. With the 1Team-System solution, designers can get up to speed quickly, spending time designing rather than learning. Moreover, code analyzed with the 1Team-System solution is simulation- and synthesis-ready and can easily be reused across multiple product generations.

With today's time-to-market pressures, few companies have the luxury of building an IP library of fully debugged SystemC models. Instead, most rely on a combination of existing RTL models and SystemC code. Such mixed-language design can complicate debugging. The 1Team-System solution bridges the modeling gap and saves significant debugging time by helping architects verify that all interfaces between SystemC and RTL are correct.

• Analyzes and optimizes SystemC code
• Quickly isolates root causes, avoiding cascading error messages common to SystemC development environments
• Ensures total system accuracy: structural, functional, data organization and communications protocol
• Real-time feedback on SystemC coding hazards
• Checks for simulation hazards, e.g., simulation blocking assignment
• Completeness checks at all abstraction levels: functionality, bus cycle, pin cycle and register transfer
• Mixed language support--SystemC and RTL
• Configurable best practices: captures and automates your organization's system-level coding expertise
• Enforces best practices for synthesizability
• Validates port and module naming conventions
• Integrated debug environment speeds analysis and source code debug/edit