IMEC joins the Open SystemC Initiative

IMEC has joined the Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI), in order to make its proprietary OCAPI-xl design environment compliant with the SystemC standard.

IMEC has joined the Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI), in order to make its proprietary OCAPI-xl design environment compliant with the SystemC standard.

IMEC has already significantly contributed indirectly and directly to the SystemC standard.

CoWare was founded with technology originally developed at IMEC.

The company is a founding member of OSCI, contributed hardware/software modelling to the SystemC language and codeveloped the SystemC reference implementation.

Over the past half year, IMEC has played a major role in defining the requirements for SystemC 3.0 within the OSCI language working group.

SystemC 3.0 will provide capabilities for describing hardware and software tasks, flexible hardware/software partitioning, and hardware/software simulation of the overall system whereby the software tasks run on a simulated real-time operating system.

IMEC's proprietary OCAPI-xl design environment features dynamic behaviour and multi-threading and has an automatic code generator from C to synthesisable register-transfer languages (RTLs) for hardware and to C processes on OS for software.

However, current RTLs do not support multithreading and dynamic behaviour of systems consisting of both hardware and software.

SystemC 3.0 will bridge this gap.

"By joining OSCI, we are convinced that we will be able to leverage our proprietary high-level automatic code generator", said Rudy Lauwereins, vice president design technology for integrated information and communication systems at IMEC.

"In the future our design methodologies will comply with the international standard SystemC".

Henk Corporaal, chief scientist of IMEC's division on design technology for integrated information and communication systems, will represent IMEC within OSCI.

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