CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
12 December 2005
Industry-Wide News
OSCI Applauds Approval of IEEE SystemCT Standard; Fully Accredited Standard Met With Worldwide Industry Support
The Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI), an independent non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and advancing SystemCT as an industry standard language for electronic system-level design, announced that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) has approved the SystemC language as IEEE Std. 1666T -2005, "Standard SystemC Language Reference Manual." Based upon the SystemC 2.1 Language Reference Manual developed by OSCI and delivered to the IEEE earlier this year, the fully accredited standard provides a precise and complete specification of the SystemC class library. Implementations can be developed with reference to the IEEE 1666 SystemC standard alone, assuring users that their design is built upon a stable and robust standard.
"Since submitting the LRM to the IEEE SystemC Standardization Working Group in April, we have been impressed with the speed of the balloting process for adoption of the standard," said Alain Clouard, chairman of OSCI. "With a foundation built upon the cooperative effort that leverages the combined technology and user experience of a broad group of companies, the industry now has a well defined standard that establishes a new baseline for support of virtually all system modeling and verification."
IEEE 1666 gives an unambiguous definition of what is required to accurately implement SystemC and provides the foundation for the next generation of tools to be built around the standard. With quick approval of the IEEE Corporate Standards Program in just eight months, the standard is being met with worldwide adoption and industry support.
Leading companies in the IP, EDA, semiconductor, electronic systems, and embedded software industries currently use SystemC to provide a rich environment for system-level design and verification. Organizations around the world are using SystemC in a wide range of projects in numerous application areas. Many semiconductor and systems companies in the SystemC community have participated at public events where they described their use of SystemC. These companies include ARM Ltd., IBM, Intel Corporation, Infineon, The Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association (JEITA), Motorola, NEC Electronics Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics, Sandia National Laboratories, Sony Corporation, Starkey Labs Inc., STMicroelectronics, and Qualcomm Inc. among others. Information on these events can be found at the OSCI website, http://www.systemc.org ; the European SystemC User Group website, http://www-ti.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de ; and the North American SystemC User Group website, http://www.nascug.org .
"Our company has been addressing the complexity of System-On-Chip (SoC) using the SystemC language for the last four years," said Jean-Marc Chateau, director of IP and Design at STMicroelectronics, an OSCI member company. "Winning the time to volume challenge is our key objective and we are moving our environment to use the IEEE 1666 standard. We expect our suppliers and partners to deliver system IP models based on this standard."
"The Starkey Colorado IC Design Center has been using SystemC in its ASIC flow for over four years," said Greg Tumbush, digital design engineer at Starkey Colorado IC Design Center. "We use SystemC for architecture exploration, RTL verification, and system simulation which have yielded two successful tapeouts with another in early 2006. Starkey Labs supports ratification of the SystemC standard by IEEE because standardization is essential for compatibility across the broad range of tools we use. We are very excited about the new capability in this release and the availability of an LRM."
"Since the ramp-up of the OSCI organization, NEC Electronics has been supportive of SystemC as the standard language for system-level design. With stepping up to IEEE standardization, interoperability and stability will be ensured and our deployment of C-based design flow will be accelerated," said Hiroshi Sakuma, general manager, Design Engineering Division, Technology Foundation Development Operation Unit of NEC Electronics Corporation.
OSCI continues to work with the SystemC community to develop system-level design standards and open source libraries that layer upon IEEE 1666 to foster a healthy ecosystem of commercial IP, tools, silicon and systems. Development of OSCI's open source proof-of-concept SystemC library continues and an updated version that removes known incompatibilities with IEEE 1666-2005 is currently under technical review within OSCI.
OSCI has added Canon Inc., Carbon Design Systems, Inc, Doulos Ltd., Intel Corporation, Jeda Technologies and Tenison EDA as new associate corporate members this year. Current associate corporate members include Atrenta, Inc., Calypto Design Systems, Inc., Celoxica Ltd., ChipVision Design Systems, AG, ESLX, Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, Intel Corporation, Prosilog SA, SpiraTech Ltd., Summit Design, Inc., Synfora, Inc. and Tenison EDA. Corporate members include ARM, Cadence Design Systems, Inc., CoWare, Inc., Forte Design Systems, Inc., Mentor Graphics Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics, STMicroelectronics and Synopsys, Inc.
The Open SystemCT Initiative (OSCI) is an independent, not-for-profit association composed of a broad range of organizations dedicated to supporting and advancing SystemC as an open industry standard for system-level modeling, design and verification. SystemC is a language built in C++ that spans from concept to implementation in hardware and software. The IEEE Standards Association recently approved the standard for the SystemC library as IEEE Std. 1666T -2005. For further information visit http://www.systemc.org .
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