System Level Design Experiences and the Need for Standardization

The growing complexity of electronic systems has forced the adoption of new design methods operating on higher abstraction levels. These new methods include for example the utilization of virtual platforms in software development, the early exploration of architectures, management of platform complexity, system-level verification, and high-level synthesis of sub-modules of a system. In this paper, some of the issues encountered in adopting these design methods into production use are discussed. Based on the experiences gathered, it seems that the methods are still somewhat immature and, frequently, based on proprietary technologies. This calls for a unified effort from the design community to come into an agreement on the details of the methods and, consequently, drive these agreements into truly open standard solutions. From system house perspective, this is the only way these new design methods can be successful. The aim of this paper is to acknowledge three key system-level standardization forums: the Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI), the Open Core Protocol-International Partnership (OCP-IP), and the Structure for Packaging, Integrating and Re-using IP within Tool-flows (SPIRIT)