Legacy designs are one of the fundamental problems facing designers using SystemC. Design reuse is a common approach to both shorten design times and increase reliability, although the latter goal cannot simply be achieved through reuse since even a sound functional block can be integrated incorrectly. Even using a mixed language simulator, engineers cannot easily obtain a full transaction level modeling (TLM) environment for their designs because some of the blocks only exist in either VHDL or Verilog. Therefore in addition to longer simulation time, engineers must spend more time interpreting the results and pruning unnecessary details that result from simulating lower level abstraction models written in HDL.

Dr. Zain Navabi, who gained recognition during the development of VHDL for his pragmatic approach to the language, has developed an environment that allows designers to handle a design fully in SystemC as well as take a SystemC design and map it into VHDL for synthesis. Two products make up the ROSTA environment. The first product, VSC, takes either a VHDL or a Verilog description and translates it to SystemC and also allows the user to graphically develop a SystemC testbench. The second product, TVS, accepts the synthesizable subset of SystemC as the input and outputs VHDL code that is accepted by all commonly used synthesis tools.

Design teams need to be able to take advantage of SystemC capabilities while retaining the largest possible portion of their existing methodology. ROSTA allows engineers to input SystemC models into their already existing synthesis flow just by using TVS. Engineers that need a complete TLM picture of the design can use VSC to abstract the VHDL and Verilog models to SystemC. As a whole ROSTA provides a convenient link between the HDL and the ESL world and requires almost no additional training to operate than what designers already know.

In addition to the TVS and VSC tools, ROSTA also provides a graphical environment that allows designers to develop testbenches graphically by drawing waveforms, as well as a way to display simulation results graphically. Pricing for ROSTA is $4995.00 for a yearly use license. Customers can also obtain just the TVS or the VSC tools individually. The price for a yearly use license is $2995.00 each. For more information or to place an order go to www.digimics.com.

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