SystemC Ecosystem gets boost with Accellera's new SystemC CCI 1.0 Standard

New standard enables greater interoperability among tools and models

Elk Grove, Calif. -- June 14, 2018 -- Accellera Systems Initiative (Accellera), the electronics industry organization focused on the creation and adoption of electronic design automation (EDA) and intellectual property (IP) standards, announced today that the Accellera Board of Directors has approved SystemC Configuration, Control and Inspection (CCI) 1.0 as an Accellera standard. SystemC CCI 1.0 is available free for download here.

The SystemC CCI standard helps to ensure sophisticated EDA tool capabilities can be utilized with models from different providers through the use of standard configuration, control, and inspection interfaces. This first release of CCI delivers standard configuration.

“The SystemC CCI standard is an important step forward in standards development for Accellera and the entire SystemC ecosystem,” stated Lu Dai, Accellera Chair. “We are very proud of the efforts of the SystemC CCI Working Group in developing and evolving the specification to get it to a 1.0 standard that will greatly improve efficiency for model creators, system integrators and tool providers.”

“Interoperability between tools and models is an increasingly important dimension of SystemC standardization and the SystemC CCI Working Group is excited to deliver this first phase to address model configuration,” stated Trevor Wieman, SystemC CCI Working Group Chair. “We received very useful feedback during the public review which ended in March and have incorporated it into this final release. The comprehensive Language Reference Manual will be accompanied by a reference implementation and a collection of examples to demonstrate the use and value of the SystemC CCI 1.0 standard.”

About SystemC CCI

SystemC CCI enables greater interoperability of SystemC models within the SystemC ecosystem. It allows tools and models to work together to provide valuable user-level capabilities. The first phase of this standard addresses model configuration; the roadmap includes checkpointing and register introspection.

The SystemC CCI Working Group addressed several key concerns while defining the 1.0 standard. Of critical importance is the ability to interact with tools for which a portable value representation has been provided, along with information about configuration parameters, including a description and flexible metadata. Among the fundamental features in the standard are avoiding name clashes with elements of the SystemC object hierarchy, looking up and accessing configuration parameters, restricting access to parameters, preloading configuration settings, callbacks for parameter creation/destruction as well as value access, traceability of parameter value updates, and support for user-defined parameter value types.

Additionally, the standard has been architected to allow existing model configuration solutions to achieve compliance through a bridge, avoiding the necessity to update models and streamlining migration.

Resources:

• Accellera’s SystemC Community is a resource for the latest information on the SystemC ecosystem.
• The SystemC CCI Community has more information on the standard, including videos and tutorials. Readers are encouraged to ask questions and interact with the working group via Accellera’s SystemC CCI Community Forum.
• To view all SystemC material available for download, visit here.

DAC Breakfast Panel

We invite you to join us at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) on Tuesday, June 26 at 7:00am at the Moscone Convention Center, room 3003 for the annual Accellera breakfast where we’ll have a panel of leaders from the Portable Stimulus and SystemC Working Groups and IP Security Assurance Proposed Working Group discussing updates on their latest developments and activities. It’s an opportunity to ask questions about the new and emerging standards from Accellera. The Accellera-sponsored breakfast is free to DAC attendees but registration is required.

About Accellera Systems Initiative

Accellera Systems Initiative is an independent, not-for profit organization dedicated to create, support, promote and advance system-level design, modeling and verification standards for use by the worldwide electronics industry. The organization accelerates standards development and, as part of its ongoing partnership with the IEEE, its standards are contributed to the IEEE Standards Association for formal standardization and ongoing change control. For more information, please visit www.accellera.org.