An Extension to Systemc to Allow Modelling of Analogue and Mixed Signal Systems at Different Abstraction Levels

SystemC is Hardware Description Language HDL for digital systems. An extension is proposed in this paper to extended the capabilities of SystemC to allow modelling of analogue and mixed-signal systems. The proposed extension provides a variety of abstraction levels, from system level to circuit level. In order to comply with the SystemC simulation cycle semantics, the analogue kernel is linked to the SystemC environment via calls from the existing digital kernel. The synchronisation of the analogue and SystemC digital kernels is done via a lock-step method. Operation of the extended, mixed-signal SystemC simulation platform is demonstrated using a practical example of a phase locked loop frequency multiplier with noise and jitter. We hope that results from this research might aid the recent efforts to standardize analogue extensions to SystemC.