TLM: An Overview and Brief History

The trend of “the smaller the better” in semiconductor industry pictures a bright future for System-on-Chip (SoC). The full exploitation of new silicon capabilities, however, is limited by the tremendous SoC design complexity to be addressed within very short project schedule. This limiting factor has pushed the need for altering the classic SoC design flow into prominence. A novel SoC design flow starting from a higher abstraction level than RTL, i.e. System-to-RTL design flow, has surfaced as a real need in advanced SoC design teams. After a decade of attempts to define a useful intermediate abstraction between SoC paper specification and synthesizable RTL, the SystemC C++ open-source class library has finally emerged as the right vehicle to explore the adequate level of abstraction. Transaction Level Modeling (TLM), a methodology based upon such abstraction, has proven revolutionary values in bringing software and hardware teams together using the unique reference model; resulting in dramatic reduction of time-to-market and improvement of SoC design quality.