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Re: [oc] Verilog coding style for Open Cores-RTL - Case in pointSHA1
Aloha!
Rudolf Usselmann wrote:
> Honestly, i don't know enough about all the feature SystemVerilog
> is adding. BUT, I'm thinking if it does build on Verilog, whats
> there to loose ? Guys who don't like all the new constructs, can
> stay in their comfort box and only use the part of the language
> they feel comfortable with. The rest of us, more adventurous guys,
> will love the additional help we get from the additions ...
Exactly. I like Superlog and SystemVerilog because they are evolutionary
developments based on Verilog. This means that there still exists a clear
path/sub domain of the language that always makes sense as a HW description.
SystemC takes a SW language and tries to extend it downwards and into the HW
domain.
Co-Design were always very explicit and clear on how you could go from
Superlog features down to RTL. The path was always there. When asking other
tool vendors how I could go from their nice, graphical HW/SW Codesign tool to
HW I usually got blank stares or mumbling about stuff in the works at their
R&D lab.
Expressed in another way: Superlog/SystemVerilog builds on something known to
work and tries to remove/alleviate problems associated with growing design
complexitieties (SoC, productivity gap etc, verification explosion and all
that). SystemC takes something that does not work (for HW design) and adds
stuff so that it (might) be able to do the same thing as the stuff known to work.
Oh, BTW: HW engineers have been building executable specs and behavioural
models for ages. They use C, Perl, Java, C++ to model blocks, functions
complete systems. Depending on what abstraction level, analysis to be
performed are different languages are better suited than others. Doing a
simple trace analysis to calculate CPI and total cycle count is probably
better done in Perl (for easy parsing) than C.
What SystemC tries to do is doing it all in one tool. I'm not totally
convinced that multi-function tools (like the screw-hammer-plier) is better
than a good toolbox with optimized point tools. HW designers are used to work
with tons of tools, so creating the do-it-all tool doesn't remove that much
problems.
--
Med vänlig hälsning, Yours
Joachim Strömbergson - Alltid i harmonisk svängning.
VP, Research & Development
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