The emergence of the system-on-chip (SoC) era is creating many new challenges at all stages of the design process. Engineers are reconsidering how designs are specified, partitioned and verified. With systems and software engineers programming in C/C++ and their hardware counterparts working in hardware description languages such as VHDL and Verilog, problems arise from the use of different design languages, incompatible tools and fragmented tool flows. Momentum is building behind the SystemC language and modeling platform as the best solution for representing functionality, communication, and software and hardware implementations at various levels of abstraction. The reason is clear: increasing design complexity demands very fast executable specifications to validate system concepts, and only C/C++ delivers adequate levels of abstraction, hardware-software integration, and performance. System design today also demands a single common language and modeling foundation in order to make interoperable system--level design tools, services and intellectual property a reality. SystemC is entirely based on C/C++ and the complete source code for the SystemC reference simulator can be freely downloaded from www.systemc.org and executed on both PCs and workstations. System Design and SystemC provides a comprehensive introduction to the powerful modeling capabilities of the SystemC language, and also provides a large and valuable set of system level modeling examples and techniques. Written by experts from Cadence Design Systems, Inc. and Synopsys, Inc. who were deeply involved in the definition and implementation of the SystemC language and reference simulator, this book will provide you with thekey concepts you need to be successful with SystemC. System Design with SystemC thoroughly covers the new system level modeling capabilities available in SystemC 2.0 as well as the hardware modeling capabilities available in earlier versions of SystemC. designed and implemented the SystemC language and reference simulator, this book will provide you with the key concepts you need to be successful with SystemC. System Design with SystemC will be of interest to designers in industry working on complex system designs, as well as students and researchers within academia. All of the examples and techniques described within this book can be used with freely available compilers and debuggers &endash; no commercial software is needed. Instructions for obtaining the free source code for the examples obtained within this book are included in the first chapter.

I am honored and delighted to write the foreword to this very first book about SystemC. It is now an excellent time to summarize what SystemC really is and what it can be used for. The main message in the area of design in the 2001 International Te- nologyRoadmapfor Semiconductors (ITRS) isthat"cost ofdesign is the greatest threat to the continuation ofthe semiconductor roadmap. " This recent revision of the ITRS describes the major productivity improvements of the last few years as "small block reuse," "large block reuse ," and "IC implementation tools. " In order to continue to reduce design cost, the - quired future solutions will be "intelligent test benches" and "embedded system-level methodology. " As the new system-level specification and design language, SystemC - rectly contributes to these two solutions. These will have the biggest - pact on future design technology and will reduce system implementation cost. Ittook SystemC less than two years to emerge as the leader among the many new and well-discussed system-level designlanguages. Inmy op- ion, this is due to the fact that SystemC adopted object-oriented syst- level design-the most promising method already applied by the majority of firms during the last couple of years. Even before the introduction of SystemC, many system designers have attempted to develop executable specifications in C++. These executable functional specifications are then refined to the well-known transaction level, to model the communication of system-level processes.