Accellera Systems Initiative Drafts SystemC AMS 2.0 Standard to Advance Dynamic and Reactive Mixed-Signal System Design

Language Reference Manual available for public review at accellera.org

DRESDEN, Germany, March 13, 2012 (at the Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference) - The Accellera Systems Initiative, an independent non-profit organization focused on the creation and adoption of electronic design automation (EDA) and intellectual property (IP) standards for design and verification, is pleased to announce the release of the SystemC Analog/Mixed-Signal (AMS) 2.0 draft standard to address the need for more dynamic and reactive modeling features for analog/mixed-signal system-level design.

This release marks the start of a public review of the SystemC AMS 2.0 draft standard, open through April 30, 2012. The SystemC AMS community of users, architects, designers and ESL tool developers are encouraged to participate in this review by providing feedback on this standard update.

The draft of the AMS 2.0 standard is available for download under the SystemC open-source license. The draft is fully compatible with the updated release of the IEEE 1666-2011 "Standard SystemC Language Reference Manual," which specifies SystemC, the high-level design language used in the design and development of electronic systems. Complementary to the system-level modeling capabilities contained within the AMS 1.0 standard, the new draft features additional semantics and language constructs to model dynamic and reactive mixed-signal behavior at high levels of abstraction.

"With the release of the SystemC AMS 2.0 draft standard, we finally fulfill a longstanding and demanding requirement of the automotive industry to dynamically change time steps and data rates during simulation," said Martin Barnasconi, Chairman of the SystemC AMS Working Group. "I'm very pleased to be achieving this milestone, exactly 10 years after the formation of the study group that started developing AMS extensions to SystemC. I invite the SystemC community to participate in this public review, which will definitely boost the adoption of mixed-signal system-level design methodologies based on SystemC and SystemC AMS in industries such as automotive and semiconductors."

The SystemC AMS 2.0 draft standard introduces dynamic features to the Timed Data Flow (TDF) model of computation, the abstract modeling style introduced in SystemC AMS. Since the release of the AMS 1.0 standard two years ago, the SystemC AMS Working Group has now formalized the execution semantics and language constructs for these dynamic features, which are documented in the AMS Language Reference Manual.

Users, modeling experts, mixed-signal design engineers and ESL tool developers are encouraged to review and discuss the AMS 2.0 draft standard with the SystemC AMS Working Group members via the AMS discussion forum. Members of Accellera Systems Initiative are invited to participate in the SystemC AMS Working Group, which will continue with the standardization of the dynamic features as preparation for the final SystemC AMS 2.0 release.

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. For membership information, please email membership@accellera.org.

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