Ltd., CoWare, Synopsys and CynApps teamed up to develop SystemC (CynApps later became Forte Design Systems) to launch it first draft version in 1999. The chief competitor at the time was SpecC another C based open source package developed by UC Irvine personnel and some Japanese companies. In June 2000, a standards group known as the Open SystemC Initiative was formed to provide an industry neutral organization to host SystemC activities and to allow Synopsys' largest competitors, Cadence and Mentor Graphics, democratic representation in SystemC development. Example code Example code of an adder: #include "systemc.h" SC_MODULE(adder) // module (class) declaration { sc_in<int> a, b; // ports sc_out<int> sum; void do_add() // process { sum.write(a.read() + b.read()); //or just sum = a + b } SC_CTOR(adder) // constructor { SC_METHOD(do_add); // register do_add to kernel sensitive << a << b; // sensitivity list of do_add } }; Power and energy estimation in SystemC The power and energy estimation can be accomplished in SystemC by means of simulations. Powersim is a SystemC class library aimed to the calculation of power and energy consumption of hardware described at system level. To this end, C++ operators are monitored and different energy models can be used for each SystemC data type. Simulations with Powersim do not require any change in the application source code. See also Accellera Chisel IDEA1 SpecC SystemRDL SystemVerilog Notes References T. Grötker, S. Liao, G. Martin, S. Swan, System Design with SystemC. Springer, 2002. A SystemC based Linux Live CD with C++/SystemC tutorial J. Bhasker, A SystemC Primer, Second Edition, Star Galaxy Publishing, 2004. D. C. Black, J. Donovan, SystemC: From the Ground Up, 2nd ed., Springer 2009. George Frazier, SystemC: Hardware-Oriented Constructs in C++ Frank Ghenassia (Editor), Transaction-Level Modeling with SystemC: TLM Concepts and Applications for Embedded Systems, Springer 2006. Stan Y. Liao, Steven W. K. Tjiang, Rajesh K. Gupta: An Efficient Implementation of Reactivity for Modeling Hardware in the Scenic Design Environment. DAC 1997: 70-75 External links SystemC Tutorial ESCUG - European SystemC Users Group NASCUG - North American SystemC User's Group LASCUG - Latin American SystemC User's Group ISCUG - Indian SystemC User's Group EDA Playground - Free web browser-based C++/SystemC IDE Hardware description languages Hardware verification languages System description languages C++ programming language family