A truce is called in the system-level language wars

The foot soldiers in the system-level language wars appear to have climbed out of the trenches and traded in their battle fatigues for suits and ties. Looking and sounding for all the world like distinguished diplomats negotiating a peace accord, representatives from two of the previously warring factions - SystemVerilog and SystemC - shared a stage in front of a sold-out crowd in Santa Clara, CA on November 5th and spoke enthusiastically about mutual cooperation and respect for their various technology initiatives.

The day-long Accellera workshop sponsored by Synopsys, Mentor Graphics, and Real Intent - “Accellera's Verilog Evolution: An Introduction to SystemVerilog” - heard both sides pledge to move forward on behalf of beleaguered chip designers, to provide integrated language options for everything from system specification to gate-level layout and design verification. This level of bonhomie would have been unthinkable a few short years ago, but the perseverance of the hard-working committees at Accellera seems to have paid off - aided, undoubtedly, in no small measure by the Synopsys acquisition of Co-Design earlier this year.

Accellera - itself a peace initiative created in 2000 out of two previous standards bodies, VHDL International and Verilog International - was chartered to find a common ground between the two HDL constituencies. Meanwhile, Co-Design, home to Verilog author, Phil Moorby, was the spring board for the Verilog-turned-system-spec-language, Superlog.

Subsequently, Accellera benefited from Co-Design's donation of the synthesizable portion of Superlog, Verplex's donation of assertion libraries, and Real Intent's and Co-Design's donations of assertion syntax and semantics and the move was on to create SystemVerilog - an extension of the IEEE 1364 Verilog-2001 standard - and take the HDL to a higher level of existence as a system specification language meeting designers' demands in the emerging era of system-on-a-chip (SoC).

However, not everyone agreed that system specifications could be articulated by limited HDL constructs. Critics believed that higher level languages had to be the source of an over-arching language for system specification, hardware design, and verification. From various corners in the industry, C-based system languages sprang up and gathered momentum - System C, in particular, benefiting from high-profile encouragement from Synopsys and other EDA players.

It was of no small import that the software guys wanted to see things progress in the C direction - a language they were raised on - while the hardware guys were equally determined to see their beloved HDLs win the day. As it turns out, the truce in the language wars - at least between SystemC and SystemVerilog - currently succeeds in moderately satisfying both sides. SystemVerilog 3.0 has been beefed up with a host of assertion constructs to meet verification demands while SystemC has been legitimized as a robust solution for system-level specifications. Accellera and Synopsys are commending both languages.

Following a keynote address by Mentor Graphics' Dennis Brophy, Stu Sutherland of Sutherland HDL, Inc. presented a detailed tutorial on SystemVerilog 3.0. Then Steve Meier of Synopsys and Rajeev Ranjan of Real Intent expanded on Sutherland's tutorial with discussions of the assertion-based verification and formal verification components of SystemVerilog.

people to work in SystemC and hardware designers to work in Verlog. It will allow the integrations of both of their effots.”

If ever there was an enthusiastic evangelist for Superlog - and SystemVerilog - that would have been Co-Design's Dave Kelf , now Senior Director of Marketing, Verification Technology Group, at Synopsys. Dave's contagious optimism today is directed at the new language cohesion in the industry: He says there's been a “bit of a re-org” within Synopsys and the SystemVerilog people and the SystemC people are now working side-by-side. “It's great,” he says. If Dave Kelf sees the move to promote both languages as a positive one, who dares argue?

Industry News

FlexPHY chip are expected to be available in Q1 of 2003, with volume production expected by Q2. The market for 10-gigabit PHYs is expected to increase from $276 million in sales in 2003 to $780 million in 2006.

developed all design editors and project managers for the Xilinx Foundation Series software.

ARM announced that more than 25 partners have signed up to provide support and technical contributions towards the development of the next generation of the AMBA (Advanced Microprocessor Bus Architecture) specification. AMBA is an open standard, on-chip bus specification freely available from ARM that details a strategy for the interconnection and management of functional blocks that make up an SoC. AMBA 3.0 technology will be available for public release in Q1 of 2003.

Twenty-five companies have collaborated on the development of the AMBA 3.0 standard, including: Agere Systems, Agilent, Atmel, Cadence Design Systems, Inc., Conexant Systems, CoWare Inc., Infineon, LSI Logic, Mentor Graphics, Micronas, Motorola, NEC Electronics Corp., NEC Electronics (Europe), Philips Semiconductors, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, Synopsys, Toshiba Corp., and Verisity.

Rafi Kedem, Senior Director of the Processor Cores Technology Group at LSI Logic said, “AMBA 3.0 technology introduces new capabilities, not just at the protocol level, but also to ease physical implementation of the bus in deep-submicron technologies. LSI Logic is already implementing targeted peripherals and subsystems based on the draft AMBA 3.0 standard.”

applications will be targeted for the communications and consumer markets.

of Fundamental Research, Université de Bretagne Occidentale, ENSTA, Ecole Centrale de Lille, University of Calgary, Linkoping University, and Ecole d'ingénieurs de Genève .

1 | 2 | 3  Next Page »

You can find the full EDACafe event calendar here.

To read more news, click here.

-- Peggy Aycinena, EDACafe.com Contributing Editor.