For release: 09 Jun 2008

Supporting Industry Quotes: Open SystemC Initiative Announces Completion of New Standard Enabling the Real-World Interoperability of Transaction Level Models

Actis Design
"At Actis Design our focus is on enabling ESL modeling through the analysis of SystemC models. TLM-2.0 is an important piece of the modeling process because of the help it provides designers in establishing a standard way to approach TLM modeling. As an OSCI member and ESL tool provider, Actis Design is pleased to support TLM-2.0 with our AcurateC code analysis product."

Joan Bartlett
Founder and President

ARM
"OSCI TLM-2.0 provides an industry-standard interface and should enable model interoperability in a wide range of environments. Using the RealView^(r) System Generator tool, we can export ARM IP based sub-systems at the programmers' view (PV) level of abstraction. RealView System Generator supports OSCI TLM-2.0 draft 1 today, and the final TLM-2.0 standard is a significant step forward enabling us to implement accelerated AMBAR protocols more efficiently."

John Cornish
Vice President of Marketing, System Design Division

Arteris
"Arteris is supporting the release of the OSCI TLM-2.0 standard with output of both loosely-timed and approximately-timed SystemC models from our Arteris NoC Solution interconnect IP generation tools."

Charlie Janac
President and CEO

Cadence
"The TLM-2.0 standard represents an important EDA industry milestone toward enabling more productive system-level design and verification. We at Cadence feel privileged to have actively contributed toward TLM- 2.0's development, and plan to support the new standard in upcoming releases of our system-level design and verification products starting end of this year."

Stuart Swan
Senior Architect and former Vice-Chairman of the OSCI TLM Working Group

Carbon Design Systems
"TLM-2.0 has the potential to revolutionize system-level design. A system-level platform is defined by its models and TLM-2.0 will be the first technology to truly enable easy model interchange and reuse. The ability to easily integrate system models from multiple vendors into a single executable will help our customers further accelerate their time to market. Carbon heartily endorses TLM-2.0 and plans to have full support for this by the end of 2008."

Bill Neifert
Chief Technical Officer and Founder

ChipVision Design Systems
"Transaction-level modeling will be a key weapon in tackling the soaring productivity requirements imposed by ever-growing design complexity. The increased abstraction of TLM, when combined with powerful EDA technology such as ChipVision's P-SAM and PowerOpt, allows a fast, high-impact and low-risk path to silicon - optimizing area and timing and, perhaps most important, keeping the lid on power consumption. Although a lack of standards hampered the adoption of TLM in the past, convergence on SystemC and the release of TLM-2.0 constitute important milestones for the future of EDA."

Dr. Eike Schmidt
Vice President Engineering

CoFluent Design
"The TLM-2.0 standard facilitates SystemC model interoperability that the industry needs. It also clarifies modeling styles, especially LT and AT that correspond to our models. We're currently based on TLM-1.0 and we'll support TLM-2.0 in the future version of CoFluent Studio, our graphical ESL architectural modeling environment."

Vincent Perrier
Co-Founder and Director

CoWare
"As the current chair of the OSCI TLM working group, CoWare is proud to have brought our deep experience in the modeling of virtual platforms for architecture design and software development to the definition of the new TLM-2.0 standard. Our industry leading ESL design solutions have been built on SystemC and TLM standards from OSCI and OCP-IP since 2003, and the standards-based model interoperability and reuse benefits they enable are extremely important to the HW and SW design teams deploying virtual platforms for production designs. CoWare customers and ecosystem partners will be pleased that new models created using TLM-2.0 interfaces will fit smoothly within CoWare environment, support the full value of our solutions, and continue to benefit from the use and adoption of CoWare's popular SystemC Modeling Library (SCML). CoWare will fully support TLM-2.0 in 2H 2008."

Patrick Sheridan
Director of Marketing

Doulos
"Model interoperability at the transaction level is such a key issue for complex design. We're proud Doulos expertise has been at the heart of the team effort that has brought this to fruition. OSCI has done a great job in getting the SystemC TLM-2.0 in such fine shape and now fully released. Doulos will now get on with the job of training the industry in developing TLM-2.0 models."

Rob Hurley
CEO

EDA-TC/JEITA
"Japan's SystemC community welcomes the release of TLM-2.0 to broaden the use of SystemC, now widely used here as the ESL language for both modeling and verification. The Electronic Design Automation Technical Committee (EDA-TC) of Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association (JEITA) established the SystemC Working Group (SCWG) in late 2003 to promote SystemC standardization in Japan, and the working group greatly contributed to the "IEEE Std. 1666-2005 SystemC language standard" at the end of 2005. So far, the SCWG has proposed improvements for the draft spec of TLM-2.0, and will continue towards standardization at IEEE in the near future. The standardization of TLM-2.0 is very important to Japan's electronics and information technology industries. With the enlargement and complexity of LSI, further improvement of design productivity and quality is a necessity. We believe that SystemC and TLM-2.0 will help Japan's design community find practical solutions to overcome these challenges."

Takashi Hasegawa, Chair of SystemC Working Group, Electronic Design Automation Technical Committee (EDA-TC), Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association (JEITA)

European SystemC Users Group (ESCUG)
The European SystemC User's Group has played an active role in SystemC development since 2000 and welcomes the introduction of transaction-level modeling for system-level design with SystemC. At a panel discussion during the 17th European SystemC User's Group Meeting at DATE 2008 system houses, semiconductor companies, and EDA companies emphasized the importance of the new TLM-2.0 features and the TLM-2.0 standard. The TLM-2.0 standard introduces new interfaces, new timing models, and a reliable modeling methodology enabling real interoperability that will enables fast IP-based system design using components from a variety of sources without time-consuming modifications.

Wolfgang Rosenstiel
Head of the European SystemC User Group

ESLX
"The electronics industry has been anticipating TLM-2.0. We believe it will unleash a pent-up demand for high-quality models that organizations can leverage in multiple ways. Our goal is to help our customers use and write their own models as well as to provide high-quality TLM-2.0 models, something ESLX is uniquely positioned for as the developers of the TLM-2.0 kit examples."

Jack Donovan
President

Forte Design Systems, Inc.
"The ability of so many companies of different types to rally around this standard shows the strength of SystemC and of the SystemC ESL community. Forte is integrating TLM-2.0 into our existing TLM synthesis capability to enhance our single-source-code flow for high-speed TLM simulation and high-level SystemC synthesis for implementation."

Brett Cline
Vice President of Marketing

GreenSocs
"Today marks the real birth of ESL! We have been waiting for the TLM-2.0 standard, and its arrival is very welcome. GreenSocs is especially pleased that our GreenBus legacy lives on in TLM-2.0. In the near future GreenSocs will announce the first openly available SystemC TLM-2.0 compliant, tool-independent modeling kit. We believe ESL, and SystemC with TLM-2.0 is ready for mass adoption."

Dr. Mark Burton
Founder

India SystemC Users Group (ISCUG)
"The latest release of TLM-2.0 is a big step forward for system design community and by and large to the ESL ecosystem. I believe the whole modeling world will see whole new advantages of ESL. We are extremely pleased and excited with the release of TLM-2.0. We are sure the new TLM-2.0 standard will enable true IP interoperability and a fail-safe standard methodology to develop fast virtual prototypes. ISCUG is committed to the adoption of TLM-2.0 and will take all the necessary steps to make TLM-2.0 easily adoptable in India."

Subodh Patil
Director at Poseidon Design Systems and Chairman of ISCUG

Intel
"The much anticipated TLM-2.0 standard addresses the real-world interoperability of transaction level models. This will streamline the integration of models from different suppliers without compromising their simulation speed, and allow for continued advances in TLM performance, productivity and usability. Intel has been actively involved in the TLM standardization process and is already working across the ESL ecosystem to incorporate TLM-2.0."

Ken Tallo
Director of Virtual Platforms in Intel's SoC Enabling Group

JEDA Technologies
"TLM-2.0 is an important standard for JEDA Technologies. It strengthens the ESL industry by enabling IP model interoperability as well as allows JEDA to focus on advanced automated ESL model verification and model quality confirmation, while integrating into other ESL vendor's solutions."

Eugene Zhang
President and CEO

Latin American SystemC Users Group (LASCUG)
"As members of the ArchC Team, we plan to adopt the TLM-2.0 standard in the next release of the ArchC tool chain, as we believe it will certainly provide better simulation speed and interoperability to our simulators. As organizers of LASCUG 2008, which will be held on Gramado-Brazil, we are committed to spread the TLM-2.0 standard adoption to Latin America."

Rodolfo Azevedo
Program Chair LASCUG 2008 and Asst. Professor, ArchC Team, University of Campinas

Mentor Graphics
"Mentor salutes OSCI and the TLM WG for completing the TLM-2.0 standard. This is a significant milestone in achieving model interoperability. Mentor's support for the TLM effort began at its inception, and we continue to demonstrate that support by implementing the new standard in Questa, our flagship verification platform."

Stephen Bailey
Director of Marketing Design and Verification Division

MIPS
"With increasing design complexity and the increasing software content of systems, transaction-level modeling in SoCs is becoming more important. But true model interoperability is a prerequisite to broad adoption. With TLM-2.0, this interoperability is becoming a reality. MIPS is committed to supporting the standards that enable our customers."

Jack Browne
Vice President of Marketing, Processor Business Group

North American SystemC Users Group (NASCUG)
"As the chairman of the North American SystemC Users Group, I have been asked by many users about when TLM-2.0 will be ready for 'prime time.' Well, I will be joining them at DAC in welcoming the completed standard into the SystemC community and believe it will help usher in a new era in system-level design.

Jack Donovan
NASCUG Chairman

NXP
"The system development of new products at an abstract level using SystemC is constantly growing in NXP. It is critical for successful deployment that aspects such as interoperability between models are supported. Both the use of 3rd party IP as well as the necessity to design faster pushes the requirements for standards providing interoperability. Coupled to the globalization of the electronics market there is also an increasing awareness that interoperability of IP and tools is the way forward. At NXP we believe that the TLM-2.0 standard from OSCI addresses these issues and is a big step in the right direction. We are very pleased that it is being released and are already deploying the standard in our company."

Ralph von Vignau
Senior Director, NXP

OCP-IP
"OCP-IP has worked closely with OSCI over the years and has delivered many thousands of copies of OCP transaction-level model kits in SystemC since 2002. OCP-IP will be releasing the next version of its SLD kit, allowing accurate modeling of the OCP-IP standard at all levels of abstraction from TL1 through to TL4 based upon the new OSCI TLM-2.0 standard. This will provide our users with seamless interoperability and will greatly assist interoperability in the industry as a whole. We welcome the announcement of the new OSCI TLM-2.0."

Ian Mackintosh
President

Rambus
"Higher level performance models are becoming increasingly important for architecture exploration, and implementation of high-performance SoCs. To effectively explore the trade-offs between different memory architectures, IC and system designers need an effective modeling infrastructure that allows them to quickly model real-world traffic patterns. Rambus is providing performance models for its leadership memory architectures such as XDR. The ability to more easily combine transaction level models from various sources and ensure interoperability based on a spec like TLM-2.0 makes this task more efficient and thus helps customers shorten their design and verification schedules."

Stefan Tamme
Director of Sales, Global Business Enablement

SpringSoft
"TLM-2.0 is an important development in the OSCI standard that will enhance the verification productivity for complex designs."

Oz Levia
Vice President, Product Marketing

STMicroelectronics
"We are very pleased with the final version of TLM-2.0, which delivers TLM model interoperability while protecting the model provider's freedom to ensure the most appropriate accuracy vs. performance trade-off. TLM-2.0 will be a key enabling technology to speed the integration of the ever-increasing number of models and tools that we use to build the verification and validation platforms for the HW/SW co-development of our most advanced designs. We expect our suppliers to provide TLM-2.0 LT compliant models along with the other usual views of the IPs we purchase."

Jean-Marc Chateau
Group Vice President for IP and Design

Synopsys
"The release of the OSCI TLM-2.0 API specification is a major milestone for the industry, and we congratulate the TLM working group for this achievement. The TLM-2.0 standard is the enabler for a true standards-based, interoperable TLM ecosystem. Synopsys will support the TLM-2.0 standard with its DesignWare System-level Library model portfolio and its range of SystemC design and simulation tools."

John Koeter
Senior Director of Marketing for IP and Services at Synopsys

Tensilica, Inc.
"C and SystemC modeling of processors has long been a focus area of Tensilica product development as many of our customers employ these technologies. We applaud the efforts of OSCI in the release of TLM-2.0 as it represents an important step forward in the wider adoption of SystemC as an integral part of the SoC design flow."

Grant Martin
Chief Scientist

Texas Instruments
"As a key member of OSCI, TI is excited about the final version of the TLM-2.0 standard, as it marks a notable achievement in advanced transaction-level modeling and allows developers to tackle interoperability challenges in complex SoC-based systems. The collaboration among OSCI members has been vital to enhancing the SystemC ecosystem, and the TLM-2.0 standard is just one of the many initiatives towards greater availability, interoperability and verification of system models that will be key to TI's software development and future market success."

Tor Jeremiassen
Simulation and modeling CTO, SDO Foundation Tools

The SPIRIT Consortium
"System development at an abstract level is constantly growing and The SPIRIT Consortium has addressed this in the latest IP-XACT 1.4 for ESL specification. Interoperability between models is a necessity for an open design flow as supported by IP-XACT. The TLM-2.0 standard from OSCI addresses these issues and we are very pleased that it is being released at DAC."

Ralph von Vignau
President

Virtutech
"Historically TLM-based models were very hardware-centric from a use-case point of view. But today, the virtual platform approach is gaining traction with software engineers who require different levels of abstraction. TLM-2.0 is establishing the foundation and the direction for standards necessary to establish virtualization and simulation as the new infrastructure for successful adoption of virtualized software development by everyone from the SOC vendors to the OEM."

Michel Genard
Vice President of Marketing, Virtutech

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