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Re: [f-cpu] System C



On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Bruno Bougard wrote:
> > More generally, i do not believe that SystemC-like development
> > is useful now because it's a low-level thing, mostly bit manipulations
> > on a cycle by cycle basis on an already partitioned design.
> > SystemC is mostly used for "SoC" where the designer must
> > trade-off between HW and SW, but there is no SW needed here :-)
> > It would be useful for a communication protocol analyser,
> > for a MPEG/JPEG stream compressor/decompressor, for specific
> > applications requiring some complex and heavy load where
> > the HW optimisation must be balanced with the latency and costs.
> 
> That's true, and that's the kind of system I am used to cope with ... Anyway,
> System-C or SysC-like libraries can also make your life easier when you try
> to model and simulate a 'system' (it can be a CPU) which is not completely
> refined. The idea is to start the design by discribing a 'data flow' model
> (that sound DSP-like but it can be extented). The interest is that you can
> model a collection of concurrent processes (exactly like in vhdl) that are
> described in high level C. You don't need to be cycle-true at that level.
> Then, you refined your model process by process (fixed-point quantization,
> timed behavior ...) using the support of the library. The output is a FSMD
> model that can be automatically translated into vdhl or verilog for
> synthesis. At any time in the development, you can 'run' (simulate) the
> complete system, even if it is not completely refined.
> 
> Now, this is 'our methodology', I don't say it is the best ...

Hi,

would the tool really help to decide during or after development
where to draw the border between hardware and software?

To my experience it's not this way because you have to program
'hardware style' to make it synthesizable. Also VHDL has that
type of problem - not all constructs from the standard can be
synthesized. It always depends on the synthesizer you use...

Could you provide a link to download the tool for evaluation?

Regards
JG

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