Object Oriented Hardware Design and Synthesis Based on SystemC 2.0

In this article we will briefly discuss the good prospects that SystemC opens for high level, and especially object oriented, hardware modeling. But we will also highlight the fundamental problems that SystemC’s higher level language constructs represent for hardware synthesis. We will further present how, based on SystemC, object oriented hardware modeling and a clear synthesis semantics can be combined, leading to an extended SystemC/C++ synthesis subset. And last, we will outline two synthesis strategies that allow direct and automated hardware synthesis from object oriented hardware specifications based on the extended synthesis subset mentioned above. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.