This chapter introduces a book that brings together a set of interesting articles about SystemC methodologies and applications. In particular, it describes the aspects of the process and methodologies used in the development of a complex system on chip (SoC), based on a combination of methods from the digital hardware and software engineering worlds. The authors adopted the use of SystemC for the design of a wireless local area network (LAN) chipset since it provides an executable language for specifying and validating designs at multiple levels of abstraction. SystemC was used for the development of an executable model of the whole system architecture. MATLAB was used for the creation of an algorithmic reference model of the physical layer SystemC model, which in turn became a reference for the later stages of the design. Very high speed integrated circuit hardware description language (VHDL) co-simulation of the given architecture was executed and implemented as a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based prototype, in order to test the performance and validate the implementation. In addition, the authors have made significant use of unified modeling language (UML) in order to provide visual structured models and documentation of the architecture and design procedures.

The application described is interesting and well structured, but does not include many details. The combination of tools and techniques used for the development seem to support each other well, and offer many advantages over traditional specification techniques.

Easy to read and well written, this chapter provides timely and significant information concerning these emerging technologies. It will be good reading for software and hardware engineers in general.