Panel moderator Gary Smith, chief EDA analyst at Gartner Dataquest, noted that people have been talking about "the level above RTL" for many years. But now, he said, ESL is here, with Europe in the lead. Europeans were the first adopters of SystemC, he said, and Japanese engineers "jumped in soon after."

"And then there's the U.S.," Smith said. "To be honest there's not a lot [of ESL]. We are obviously behind. Can we catch up?"

Probably not, said Maurizio Vitale, senior principal at Philips Semiconductors' Design Technology Group in Hoffman Estates, Ill. He noted that Philips' ESL development is all in Europe and India, and that the U.S. operation doesn't want it, despite Philips' conviction that ESL is the right move.

"The U.S. is still in denial," Vitale said. "They don't recognize the problem." It won't be easy to catch up, he said, because it takes organizational changes and resources to make the move to ESL.

Tony Chin, U.S.-based director of worldwide business development for Japanese training firm HD Lab, noted that a majority of designs in Japan are driven by consumer electronics. Competition is intense, and design cycles are short. Chin said that Japanese electronics companies have used C language design for quite some time, and that there's a lot of interest in SystemC today, along with some use of high-level synthesis.

"Most [Japanese] companies plan to have a SystemC design methodology in place by 2006," Chin said.

Brett Cline, vice president at SystemC synthesis provider Forte Design Automation, said ESL has become an imperative because of rising gate counts. A 50 million gate design would require 7 million lines of RTL code, he noted. Further, he said, the need for faster verification is leading the jump in abstraction.

Cline noted that the European and Japanese markets are heavily oriented to consumer electronics, and that dataflow-oriented designs make it relatively easy to move to SystemC. "They're making big chips and systems with tons of software, and it requires new thinking for them," Cline said. "They realize RTL is not going to cut it."

But, he said, the U.S. can and will catch up. "When new technology takes hold in the U.S. it moves very quickly," Cline noted.

ESL is not synonymous with SystemC, noted Emil Girczyc, CEO of Summit Design. He noted that there's lots of non-SystemC ESL use in the U.S. already. Many companies do C/C++ modeling, some use hardware/software co-design and co-verification, and there's just as much use of Matlab as in Europe or Japan, he noted.

What will drive SystemC adoption in the U.S., he said, is the availability of tools. While Europeans tend to adopt methodologies, Girczyc said, American teams start with tools. Synopsys' Design Compiler was the catalyst that drove adoption of RTL design, he noted, and a similar "killer app" is needed for SystemC.

"When EDA vendors have credible tools, adoption will be as quick in the U.S. as in other countries," Girczyc said.