The Best of Both Worlds

Today, Mentor Graphics announced that Catapult C now also synthesizes SystemC. This is significant news. Hardware designers can now adopt a high-level synthesis solution which will not limit them in any way, offering the ability to design and synthesize from both ANSI C++ and SystemC. Catapult C now combines the best of both worlds, and engineers can choose the language and abstraction that best fits their design needs or corporate methodology. Cycle-accurate, TLM or purely untimed: Catapult supports all modeling styles.

EDA is an interesting industry where one language never seems to be enough to do the job. A hardware design language? VHDL or Verilog. A power format? UPF or CPF. A verification methodology? OVM or VMM. An assertion language? SVA or PSL… Fatality or necessity, we seem to like cultivating two ways of doing the same thing. Each approach undoubtedly has its own merits, but the overlap is large enough to call those duplicates.

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It is very tempting to add ANSI C++ and SystemC as high-level synthesis languages to this long list. But the language debate which has divided the HLS community during the past couple of years is of a different kind.

Real and strong differences actually exist between the two approaches. Pure C++ is strictly untimed and sequential; SystemC is timed and has concurrency.  Pure C++ is simple to write and used by many; SystemC is the language of choice for ESL. Pure C++ is most abstract; SystemC offers a fine-grain of modeling details. Here again, the list is long, but this is a list of complementing strengths, a list where a limitation here is balanced by a strength there.

The debate is over, and so should be the hesitation.

Mentor Graphics will be showcasing this new release of Catapult with dual ANSI C++ and SystemC support at the EDSFair in Yokohama, Japan, January 28th and 29th. See you there!

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