SEAMS - a SystemC environment with analog and mixed-signal extensions

We describe an efficient implementation of analog and mixed-signal extensions integrated with SystemC 2.0. SEAMS (SystemC environment with analog and mixed-signal extensions) uses a general-purpose analog solver to handle analog extensions and to provide modelling capabilities for general, mixed-mode systems with digital and non-linear analog behavior. We have extended the SystemC 2.0 kernel to invoke and synchronize our analog solver in each simulation cycle while maintaining compliance with the SystemC simulation cycle semantics. The operation of SEAMS is illustrated with the practical examples of boost power converter and a 2 GHz phase-lock loop frequency multiplier with noise and jitter models. Mixed-signal systems of this kind are known to be difficult to simulate as they exhibit discrete time scales which put most simulators in numerical difficulties. We hope that the practical experience of SEAMS might aid the recent efforts to standardize analog and mixed-signal extensions for SystemC.