Today, the hardware and software worlds are in the midst of a concurrent structural evolution. This evolution not only represents the next stage of abstraction above RTL and programming languages, but also offers an opportunity for a common development paradigm.

Those two parallel evolutions have different names but have much in common. The hardware world calls this evolution ESL (electronic system level), with SystemC as a key driving technology. The software world calls this evolution model-based design or MDE (model-driven engineering), with the Object Management Group model-driven architecture – MDA – known as its most popular representative. Unified Modeling Language (UML) and its various flavors, and Matlab/Simulink, are the leading MDE technologies.

From a high-level perspective, ESL implies working with models and generating other models or code for the following: • System architecting (virtual systems) • Early software development (virtual platforms) • Verification (virtual prototypes) • Hardware implementation (high-level synthesis) Simulating the execution of an electronic system that consists of both hardware and software requires a common platform. Today, most ESL virtual platforms provide the same software execution paradigm as RTL virtual prototypes: ISS (instruction-set simulators) for executing C/C++. This is not in phase with where the software design goes, which is MDE.

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