If you are reading this article it is just because you are aware of the current trend in the field of hardware design. That is to say that systemC is replacing the specially designed HDL's like Verilog and VHDL in many situations. This does not mean that these HDL's are obsolete now, instead, systemC supports a new approach to design a system.

The systemC born because of the necessities of the current electronic industry: Electronic gadgets are incorporating greater and greater functionality today, but not compromising with the time to produce and market the gadgets. For example, you want your mobile handset to have internet facility but you are not ready to wait for one year for that facility to come. It is easy for you to demand, but it is not so easy for electronic design engineers who design the system. The greater complexity of the future systems are making the situation still worst. Previously, the C (or C++) was used to write the software part of the design. For hardware part any of the existing HDL's were used to design the hardware. It was very difficult to setup a testbench which is common for both, since they are entirely different languages. The introduction of systemC solved many of these problems.

The systemC is nothing but a C++ class library specially designed for system design. This is an open source ware, maintained by OSCI (Open source SystemC Initiative).