SC2AST Review Page

Comments in this colour have been added by Darran Gaskell

Please add comments about SC2AST on this page.

What to include in Review Comments

Your comments may be brief or lengthy, but basically the Review Manager needs your evaluation of the kit. If you identify problems along the way, please note if they are minor, serious, or show-stoppers.

Here are some questions you might want to answer in your review:

• What is your evaluation of the design?
• What is your evaluation of the implementation?
• What is your evaluation of the documentation?
• What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the kit?
• Did you try to use the kit? With what simulator? Did you have any problems?
• How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study?
• Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain?

And finally, every review should answer this question:

• Do you think the kit should be accepted as a GreenSocs kit? Be sure to say this explicitly so that your other comments don't obscure your overall opinion.

Anchor(Results)

You may use the following text box as a quick way of adding to this page, but its probably better to use the wiki "edit" button. In both cases you MUST log in first (which is quick and easy, see "USER login") Insert

Posted on behalf of Luciano Lavagno I downloaded the parser and tried it on an example I had. From a VERY superficial look (reading XML is not one of my strengths :-) ) it seems to do what it is advertised for. Installation was reasonably easy (most of the issues were due to getting and installing java and xerces, not Kascpar itself). Making systemc classes as keywords is quite dangerous, IMO. Newer versions of the language are very difficult to maintain, and I don't know how they could handle inheritance from user-defined modules (A inherits from B which inherits from sc_module). Moreover, doing static analysis of pointers and so on for the purpose of deriving the appropriate binding (very different from Pinapa, as afar as I can tell) is a verry difficult task to achieve, and will cause pains with tricky designs that e.g. connect arrays of modules via loops. All in all, it's a useful piece of work if someone needs a jump-start in SystemC-based home-grown EDA, so I am IN FAVOR of it. It seems much easier to set up and use than PinAPA, even though it will break for complex designs for the reasons listed above. Best regards, Luciano Lavagno