In light of the troubles at OSCI, the SpecC Technology Open Consortium is now "the good consortium," according to Dan Gajski, professor of information and computer science at U.C. Irvine. "It is not dominated by EDA vendors, but by academics and system companies," Gajski said. "The language group is open to everyone for discussion and is making good progress."

Gajski led the research team that developed SpecC in 1997 at U.C. Irvine's Center for Embedded Computer Studies. Aimed at a higher level of abstraction than SystemC currently addresses, SpecC defines a formal, executable specification that lends itself to early simulation. Large Japanese semiconductor and systems companies have been SpecC's strongest industrial backers.

Since SpecC aims at system-level design, and the initial SystemC 1.0 release is primarily a register-transfer level language, the two have to date been largely regarded as complimentary. But as SystemC moves up in abstraction with its 2.0 and subsequent releases, the potential for overlap and competition is expected to grow.

The SpecC Technology Open Consortium includes EDA vendors such as Cadence Design Systems, Co-Design Automation, Mentor Graphics, and C Level Design. Industrial members include Conexant, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Motorola, NEC, Oki, Seiko Epson, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba and Toyota.

Both SystemC and SpecC efforts aim to make the C language usable for hardware and software design, but the two proposals take different approaches. While SystemC provides a C++ class library, SpecC is an extension of C with hardware and software modeling concepts, Gajski said. SpecC has "well developed abstraction levels" and a clear methodology that extends from the original specification to RTL code, he said.

While SystemC is primarily aimed at simulation, Gajski said, SpecC was developed with synthesis and verification in mind. And while SystemC today targets RTL design, SpecC is a system-level design language intended for specification and architectural modeling, Gajski said.

As Synopsys Inc.'s strong involvement with the SystemC initiative is at the root of that group's latest ruckus, Gajski boasted that EDA vendors don't play a significant role in SpecC. But that may also be SpecC's weakness. It remains to be seen whether EDA vendors will develop tools that support the SpecC language.

Cadence Design Systems Inc., for instance, is a member of both OSCI and the SpecC consortium, but is focusing most of its efforts on SystemC, said Stan Krolikoski, vice president of business operations for the functional verification group at Cadence (San Jose, Calif.).

"I really want to avoid language wars," Krolikoski said. "I would prefer to have one system-level language. SystemC is what we've chosen at Cadence, based on customer inputs."

The open-source SpecC reference compiler, simulator and testbench are available from the CECS Web site. The software runs under Linux and Solaris at present, and will be ported later to Windows NT.