The Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI) announced that requirements for the configuration portion of the SystemC Configuration, Control and Inspection (CCI) standardization effort are now available for public review. They are currently available for download under open-source license. The public review period of the CCI Configuration Requirements Specification extends through April 2, 2010. The worldwide SystemC community of users, architects, ESL tool developers and IP providers are encouraged to participate and provide feedback using the CCI discussion forum.

"The value of ESL models is greatly improved when they can readily and easily be configured, controlled and inspected," said OSCI CCI Working Group Chairman Trevor Wieman. "The CCI WG is excited to provide a specification of configuration requirements for public review. This document describes a conceptual model for understanding the SystemC configuration challenge and key anticipated use cases in addition to specific requirements. Configuration represents a first big step towards model-to-tool interoperability and the CCI WG looks forward to SystemC community input to help set a direction for this important work."

Today, each tool has its own preferred way to instrument models. This requires models developers to provide different instrumentation for their customers using different tools, or customers and their suppliers to work together to provide bridges for any incompatibilities between model instrumentation and tool support. This can result in delays in model availability and/or diminished value for the end user.

The goal of the public review of the Configuration Requirements Specification is to gather useful feedback to prepare for the creation of a draft standard to allow models to incorporate configuration parameters, allowing any tool to connect and perform the required configuration. Configuration will be used to specify a system's initial setup, orchestrate run-time operation, control system analyses and many other purposes.

The end results will be that models will be portable across simulation environments and tools, while tools will be able to add value on top of the basic mechanisms, such as the reading of configuration files, interactive configuration of models in a GUI, and structured display and inspection of current parameter values.