Ingredients for Successful System Level Design Methodology

System Level Design (SLD) and Electronic System Level (ESL) Design are buzzwords of today‘s Electronic Design Automation industry. The idea is to raise the level of abstraction of the design entry for future hardware systems beyond the register transfer level. This is necessitated by the increasing complexity of the systems, co-dependence between hardware and software, the immense gate count available on a single chip, the relatively slower growth in designer productivity, and decreasing design turn around time. Even though a number of languages and design environments have been proposed in the last few years which include SystemC, Bluespec, SpecC, and System Verilog, etc., none of these satisfy our wish list for a successful system level design language or framework. We want languages and frameworks which will enable us to model heterogeneous system-on-chips. These can be best captured by a language capable of expressing and co-simulating multiple models of computation. Also, we want to model behavior rather than structure, and want our SLD languages to support simulation of behavioral hierarchy, rather than structural ones available in the existing languages. We also want easier integration of frameworks and tools from various vendors and open source tools that not only support design, verification, dynamic waveform viewing, coverage driven dynamic test generation within the same framework, but also allows dynamic enabling or disabling some of the tools from the integrated framework to speed up simulation as needed. We also want open source Eclipse plug-in for SystemC or similar ESL languages. We want the ability for dynamic reflection and introspection from a running simulation to provide us with information about simulation state and accordingly generate tests dynamically to fulfill coverage goals. Ingredients for Successful System Level Design Methodology discusses these wish lists, and provides detailed discussions on how our prototype implementations provide us with these much desired features.