Nokia's stance is not unlike that of many chip and board makers who shared their experiences as part of a panel organized by the Open SystemC Initiative (OCSI) at the 43rd Design Automation Conference here Monday afternoon (July 24). Panelists including Emulex, Freescale, Nokia and Texas Instruments said they are experimenting with ESL tools that hold promise but still present a number of challenges.

"Currently the results [of our pilots] are pretty positive," said Tommi Makelainen, a senior engineer at the Nokia Research Center in Finland. "We see a number of problems, but there are also enough benefits to make it worthwhile," he said.

Initially, the cell phone makers may adopt ESL tools for architectural prototyping and verification. Other parts of the design process may follow later depending on how the tools evolve. In addition, Nokia may specify some of its own internal ESL requirements to make up for the incomplete nature of ESL standards.

ESL tools aim to raise the abstraction level of design so that hardware and software developers working across the design process can collaborate using a set of data representations of a system or complex system-on-chip. One of the main problems holding ESL back today is the lack of vendor models of intellectual property blocks in system-level languages such as SystemC, the Nokia engineer said.

"Today you get as many different kinds of IP models as there are providers," Makelainen said.

Higher-level standards are also lacking, according to a senior TI engineer on the panel.

"If you take away one message from this meeting it should be that we need standards in bus, configuration, debug and profiling interfaces, and it's the same for IP," said Loic Le Toumelin, a principal engineer for TI.

Today, TI engineers derive a variety of RTL, simulation and virtual prototyping specs from a single English-language description of a product. Each technical spec must be carefully checked to make sure it agrees with the other specs.