Electronic System Level Design

This book devises ESL design from the pragmatic perspective of a SystemC-based representation by showing how to build and how to use ESL languages, models and tools. It includes TLM 2.0 and step-by-step examples; it also addresses power modeling.

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Electronic System Level Design: an Open-Source Approach is based on the successful experience acquired with the conception of the ADL ArchC, the development of its underlying tool suite, and the building of its platform modeling infrastructure. With more than 10000 accesses per year since 2004, the dissemination of ArchC models reached not only students in quest of proper infrastructure to develop their research projects but also some companies in need of processor models to build virtual platforms using SystemC.


The need to anticipate the development of hardware-dependent software and to build virtual prototypes gave rise to Transaction Level Modeling (TLM). Since SystemC provided the elements and the adequate abstraction level for supporting TLM, their relation has grown so strong that OSCI created a TLM Working Group whose effort resulted in the recently released TLM 2.0 standard, which is also covered in this book.