System design with SystemC

This book opens with a foreword that makes the case for SystemC as a timely subject. It draws on the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, which identifies design cost as the biggest obstacle to the semiconductor industry's progress. The text traces how recent gains in productivity came from reusing small and large blocks and from better implementation tools, and it names intelligent test benches and embedded system-level methodology as the next needed solutions.

The foreword presents SystemC as a new specification and design language for system-level work, and it argues that the language already contributes to these future solutions. It suggests that SystemC became the leading system-level language within about two years because it adopted object-oriented system-level design, an approach many firms were already using. It also explains that engineers had long written executable specifications in C++ and refined them to the transaction level to model communication between system-level processes.