Today's embedded systems interact more tightly with the analog physical environment, where digital HW/SW subsystems becomes functionally interwoven with analogue/mixed-signal (AMS) blocks such as RF interfaces, power electronics, or sensors and actuators. Examples are cognitive radios, sensor networks or systems for image sensing. This requires new means to model and simulate the interaction between AMS subsystems and HW/SW subsystems at functional and architecture level. Especially for this purpose, the SystemC language standard has been extended with AMS capabilities.

This tutorial will present the motivation and unique capacities of the SystemC AMS extensions for industrial applications in wireless communication and automotive. New modelling concepts and design refinement methods for mixed-signal systems are explained. An application example of a heterogeneous wireless sensor network is presented, covering modelling across several disciplines (physics, digital, analogue/RF, software), modelling principles and numerical analysis methods.

This tutorial targets hardware and system engineers, architects and verification engineers active in industrial projects where analogue and digital functionality comes together. The tutorial will bring hands-on experience how to efficiently use the SystemC AMS extensions for system design and verification tasks.