Evaluation of a refinement-driven systemC™-based design flow

This paper describes the experiences and results that were made with a systemC-based design flow for the implementation of an automotive digital hardware design. We present the refinement process starting from an initial high-level executable specification in C++ via systemC down to a gate-level description. We compare the synthesis results of the systemC-based system-level design flow with those from a traditional VHDL-based register-transfer level design flow in terms of efficiency and simulation performance.