SystemC Based Object Oriented System Design
Seppo Virtanen, Dragoş Truşcan, Johan Lilius · Åbo Akademi University Research Portal · 2001
SystemC is a recently introduced open source C++ class library that can be used for designing RTL-level executable specifications and cycle-accurate simulators of hardware in C++. It is actively supported by many major EDA tool vendors. During the last year we have extensively used different versions of SystemC to create simulators and executable models of programmable protocol processors. During this time we have had to solve a number of programming problems in SystemC to be able to instantiate hardware modules dynamically and to easily construct different hardware implementations for the same target application. In this paper we describe the object oriented programming techniques we have found useful and the problems we have encountered upon trying to use them. We point out problematic SystemC programming conventions and discuss the benefits of using object oriented programming techniques in hardware design.