Christopher Lennard and Matthew Bellantoni
ARM and Carbon Design Systems

ESL is emerging as viable—indeed necessary—part of the SoC design process. The viability is being driven by the emergence and adoption of industry-wide standards. Key to enabling ESL design today is full design-chain support, with IP providers providing models of IP at the critical levels of abstraction. Only IP vendors can certify the correctness of models as validation suites are a part of the 'crown jewel' of the IP vendor, so supply of models to standard interfaces is absolutely critical. With the industry wide adoption of standards for ESL design—the SystemC language, the RealView ESL APIs and the flow from ESL to implementation using the SPIRIT Consortium Specifications—we are finally able to bring the 'ideal' elements of ESL design into the realm of the practical.