!!! "It's not a BUG, jcooley@TheWorld.com
/o o\ / it's a FEATURE!" (508) 429-4357
( > )
\ - / INDUSTRY GADFLY: "SystemC Won't Go Quietly Into The Night"
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by John Cooley, EE Times Columnist
Holliston Poor Farm, P.O. Box 6222, Holliston, MA 01746-6222
While putting together ESNUG 414, I noticed how well Tenison's cycle-based
Verilog to SystemC VTOC simulator did in a user benchmark. Robert Clark of
Parama Networks reported seeing 14x to 29x speed-ups over VCS 7.0 on his
two VTOC benchmarks. I had to call Brett Cline of Forte.
Brett's been my sparring buddy on SystemC ever since ESNUG 412 where he beat
me up using my own data to show how SystemC has a 38 percent approval rating
amongst users for architectural explorations. I called Brett on the Tenison
benchmark to congradulate him, especially since Synopsys had pretty much
abandoned SystemC to promote System Verilog.
"Your death of SystemC is greatly exaggerated," said Brett. "SystemC use is
growing by leaps and bounds, John. It's its own ecosystem now."
"Only hard data speaks. Everything else is fluff," I replied.
"Well," responded Brett, "at DAC, we had meetings/demos with 182 engineers
from 84 companies. Plus over 400 people overflowed the SystemC luncheon on
Tuesday afternoon. I'll get the others to respond, too."
"This was our biggest DAC ever," emailed Alan Naumann, CEO of CoWare. "We
showed our ConvergenSC to more than 400 engineers at our booth, suite, and
partner breakfast with ARM and Verisity. We saw bookings grow 250 percent
over last year. CoWare and SystemC are definitely on a roll."
"We had over 400 engineers from 170 companies at DAC looking at our SystemC
tools," added Rami Rachamim of Summit Design. "We also had 350 people
attend our own ESL seminar, too. SystemC isn't niche any more."
And Carl Harris of Kluwer Academic Books said that his #2 and #6 DAC best
sellers this year were on SystemC. Hmmmmm.
The only people who refused hard data was Cadence. I'm looking forward to
calling Brett on that one. If big olde Cadence can't make money off of
SystemC, it doesn't bode well for Brett's ecosystem. Grin.
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John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a
contract ASIC designer, and loves hearing from engineers at
"jcooley@TheWorld.com" or (508) 429-4357.
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