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High-Level Design And High-Level Verification

By Dominik Strasser, OneSpin Solutions

Expectations for C++/SystemC designs must be set properly.

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Not so long ago, some EDA vendors were painting a very attractive picture of chip design in the then-near future. The idea was that an architectural team would write a single description of the complete system in some high-level language, usually C/C++/SystemC, and that a new class of EDA tool would automatically partition the design into hardware and software, choosing the functionality of each to meet the project’s power/performance/area (PPA) goals. Such a tool would generate SystemVerilog RTL for the hardware, which would be turned into a chip (or chips) by logic synthesis. The tool would generate C code for the software portions, in the form of programs that could be compiled directly and run on the hardware. The system-level description would remain the golden source, and neither hardware engineer nor programmer would have to make any changes to the generated design and software. Further, virtually all functional verification would be done on the system-level model.

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