Recently, I got together with a bunch of folks to discuss the current state-of-play with regard to the use of SystemC and Transaction Level Models/Modeling (TLM). Here are the discussions relating to the eighth question: "When first adopting SystemC, who are the typical first users? Designers? Verification Engineers? Architects? Others?"

Question #8: When first adopting SystemC, who are the typical first users? Designers? Verification Engineers? Architects? Others?

Verification and Design Languages - SystemC for design and OVM e/SV for verification

Simon Davidmann (Imperas): It could be any of these, but it's definitely not the software development teams.

Nagendra Gulur Dwarakanath (TI): Architects have been first off the block. In-house modeling teams have also stayed ahead in deploying SystemC into the rest of the organization.

Marc Schmitz (STEricsson): Architects and verification engineers first, than designers and software developers.

Ravi Venugopalan (Sonics): Architects and the modeling team.

David Beal (Virtutech): Our limited experience shows that the first user is often an engineer who works with RTL and is interested in moving to higher levels of abstraction.

J.C. Yeh (ITRI): CAD engineers.

Brian Bailey (Independent Consultant): Verification engineers have been the most aggressive adopters so far as they had both the need and the opportunity. System architects are more likely to have been using C, but this can easily be dropped into a SystemC framework. The designers are perhaps the last to come on board as this was not a real possibility until the high-level synthesis tools had improved enough to ensure good quality of results.

Steve Brown (Cadence): IP Designers and Systems Engineers will use it first. They are typically Architects and those who develop virtual platforms for SW usually try it first. Following along quickly are HW designers and Verification Engineers.

Patrick Sheridan (CoWare): In terms of next generation product design, virtual platforms are used by system designers to explore architecture performance during initial product planning. These platforms typically use workload models based on traffic generation to measure the performance the system as early as possible, before any embedded software or RTL is available. Software developers can also use virtual platforms early in the design process, before RTL is available. System verification engineers can then reuse these models to enable earlier development of system tests. In terms of overall deployment, in many cases companies will start with the combination of architecture design and software development for a related project, to maximize the initial ROI.

Frans Theeuwen (NXP): The software programmers (driver software developers) are the first users.

Shabtay Matalon (Mentor): The first users are typically the architects, then designers and then verification engineers.

Laurent Ducousso (STMicroelectronics): This is mainly driven by verification engineers and experimentation in an organization that has a dedicated modeling team. Architects are more at the MATLAB and C/C++ level. SystemC and TLM is more part of the development phase.

Question #7 | Introduction/Overview | Question #9