September 29, 2005 -- SystemC came about because of the need to model systems-on-a-chip (SoCs). SoCs require concurrent modeling of hardware and software, increasing complexity to a level that could not be managed any other way. Today’s use of SystemC ranges from SoC design to FPGA design to test and verification of chips.

However, if we look a little deeper, it becomes clear that SystemC has much more to offer in a variety of different technology domains and applications. The platform is actually well-suited to model almost any real-life system or organism. It offers an extensible framework, an integral concept of time at multiple scales, the ability to encapsulate algorithms and behavior in modules with well-defined interfaces, the ability to model concurrent behavior, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to provide a variety of visualization mechanisms.

By Imran H. Khan. (Kahn is founder and president of SoftServ International.)