Trend of system level design and an approach to C-based design

Abstract

System level design study group in EDA technical committee of JEITA has researched the trends of system level design technologies from various aspects of views so as to define an ideal design flow and methodology. The results of the investigations consist of (1) problems and requirements from system level designers (needs), (2) current status of system level design tools (seeds), (3) standardization activities for system level design languages, and so on. They also proposed a desirable system level design flow taking account of the needs and the seeds.In this paper, we introduce the summary of their works. After that, I describe an approach to a C-based architecture design, called Bach, which we have developed. The features of the Bach system are (1) C-based user language with untimed semantics which is suitable for large-scale circuit design, (2) a fast bit-accurate simulator at the C level, (3) a high level synthesizer which can compile a program describing the untimed behavior of hardware into RTL VHDL. Using the example of an MPEG-4 video codec design, we summarize its design flow and effects.