Book Note: J. Bhasker, A SystemC Primer, Star Galaxy Publishing, 2002, ISBN
0-9650391-8-8

As hardware design has become more complex with chips and circuits involving
millions of basic elements, practitioners have turned to hardware
description languages to characterize their systems.  These languages allow
one to describe a circuit as a sequence of statements much like a typical
computer program.  They also provide a convenient way to document designs
and transfer intellectual property.  The most prominent ones, Verilog and
VHDL (the two differ only in details), are today in use in thousands of
installations for creating semiconductor chips and electronic circuits.  The
main problem with these specialized languages is their relatively small user
base (in the thousands).  Few engineers know them, training is difficult to
obtain, and support is limited.  An alternative is to extend the virtually
universally known and widely supported C (or C++) language.  One such
extension is SystemC, a product of The Open SystemC Initative
(www.systemc.org).  It has the support of the big three EDA companies
(Cadence, Mentor Graphics, and Synopsys), as well as many other EDA vendors
and customers such as Ericsson, NEC, Motorola, Sony. Fujitsu, Infineon,
Lucent, Texas Instruments, and Xilinx.

Of course, even though the extension is “C-like”, it is still a thing of its
own and you’ll need a book to learn it.  One such book is J. Bhasker’s A
System C Primer (Star Galaxy Publishing, 2002).  Bhasker has written many
widely used books on VDHL and Verilog.  His book covers the reasons behind
SystemC, basic features, data types, modeling of combinational logic,
modeling of synchronous logic, and test benches.  It includes standard
examples and exercises.  You can obtain it from the usual sources (such as
amazon.com) or from Star Galaxy Publishing via their Web site
(www.stargalaxypub.com).  The price is $69.95.

Dr. Lance A. Leventhal
Technical Editor, Network Systems Design Conference Newsletter
(858) 756-3327/2656 fax
lance@networksystemsdesign.com