SystemC 2.3 and 1666-2011

The much awaited SystemC 2.3 is now available for Public review.

The updated specification of SystemC (1666-2011) is also made available. Similar to its predecessor, this is also downloadable free of cost from IEEE website.

The main changes from the 1666-2008 are the number of pages increased to 638! The list of changes is already mentioned in the specification (Annex D). So it won't be good if I copy them and paste here. Still some important ones are

Dynamic Process Capabilities
These will help us to control a SC_THREAD easily.
With v2.2, all threads need to handle the reset, wait in an explicit manner. Now with added functions, a Thread can be reset in a clean way.

Event Naming
A name can be assigned to an event. This will help us in debugging to find out.

+ A number of other additions/changes to SystemC functions and classes
- sc_start(), sc_pause()
- sc_get_status()
- sc_pending_activity(), sc_time_to_pending_activity()
- sc_vector<>, sc_assemble_vector()
- set_verbosity_level(), SC_REPORT_INFO_VERB()
- sc_event_and_list, sc_event_or_list
- sc_prim_channel::async_request_update()

TLM 2.0
Now TLM 2.0 is made a standard of SystemC. Already most tools are supporting TLM 2.0. All semiconductor companies which were following their own standards are in the process of migrating to these new standards.

As I get to practice these new features, I will try to post the usecases for the important ones.