For the near future, the recent predictions and roadmaps of silicon
semiconductor technology all agree that the number of transistors on a
chip will keep growing exponentially according to Moore's Law, pushing
technology towards the system-on-a-chip (SOC) era. However, we are
increasingly experiencing a productivity gap where the chip complexity
that can be handled by current design teams falls short of the
possibilities offered by technological advances. Together with growing
time-to-market pressures, this drives the need for innovative measures
to increase design productivity by orders of magnitude.
It is commonly agreed that the solutions for achieving such a leap in
design productivity lie in a shift of the focus of the design process to
higher levels of abstraction on the one hand and in the massive reuse of
predesigned, complex system components (intellectual property, IP) on
the other hand. In order to be successful, both concepts eventually
require the adoption of new languages and methodologies for system
design, backed-up by the availability of a corresponding set of
system-level design automation tools.
This book presents the SpecC system-level design language (SLDL) and the
corresponding SpecC design methodology.
The SpecC language is intended for specification and design of SOCs or
embedded systems including software and hardware, whether using fixed
platforms, integrating systems from different IPs, or synthesizing the
system blocks from programming or hardware description languages. SpecC
Specification Language and Methodology describes the SpecC methodology
that leads designers from an executable specification to an RTL
implementation through a well-defined sequence of steps. Each model is
described and guidelines are given for generating these models from
executable specifications. Finally, the SpecC methodology is
demonstrated on an industrial-size example. The design community is now
entering the system level of abstraction era and SpecC is the enabling
element to achieve a paradigm shift in design culture needed for
system/product design and manufacturing.
SpecC Specification Language and Methodology will be of interest to
researchers, designers, and managers dealing with system-level design,
design flows and methodologies as well as students learning system
specification, modeling and design.
