OSCAR
OSCAR® is a high performance, standards compliant SystemC®/TLM simulation library implementation.
Commercial Alternative to the OSCI SystemC Simulator
- Baseline, royalty free, feature set.
- Enhanced feature set, comprising a number of value add features available to VWorks customers as part of the VLAB product line.
- Commercial grade implementation and test
- Higher simulation performance
- Faster simulation data logging and tracing
- Expanded range of data logging and tracing, such as tracing to console and TLM transaction tracing
- Support for model DLLs under Windows (available only to Linux users with OSCI)
- User licensed distribution without royalty or license fees
- Access to additional features and capabilities on demand
- Commercial support and maintenance
In addition to the base set above, OSCAR provides a number of high end value added features available to VWorks customers as part of the VLAB product line.
Standards Compliance
OSCAR has been built to be compliant with the industry standards for SystemC/TLM. OSCAR is model source code level compatible with IEEE Standard SystemC 1666™-2005 and the OSCI SystemC 2.2 reference implementation, as well as the latest SystemC TLM 2.0.1 transaction level modelling standard. Each OSCAR release is tested to ensure full compliance with these standards.
To enable some of the OSCAR simulator features, we have had to develop a different header file implementation for OSCAR compared to the OSCI SystemC 2.2 reference implementation. To use your SystemC models with OSCAR you will need to compile with the OSCAR simulation library. All models that compile with the OSCI simulation library will compile with OSCAR. If you are a user of the OSCI SystemC 2.2 reference simulator, you can easily compile your models with OSCAR and exploit the benefits OSCAR offers.
High Performance
OSCAR is designed to deliver higher simulation performance. The OSCAR simulation kernel uses advanced just-in-time compilation techniques to reduce the internal overheads. Critical code sections have been optimised resulting in a significant speedup of most simulations as compared to the reference OSCI SystemC 2.2 implementation. In particular, simulations that make use of data logging and signal tracing often execute many times faster on OSCAR than on OSCI.
Commercial Implementation
The OSCAR simulation library has been developed for critical commercial use. OSCAR is designed, tested, quality assured, and maintained to the highest levels of software engineering quality. It has been deployed and field tested in a large number of commercial simulators, over a period of years. It is an established, mature and reliable product based on modern software technology.
An enhanced version of OSCAR, that uses the same code base but provides additional advanced capabilities, features, and APIs, is used by the VWorks VLAB™ line of products.
Royalty Free Commercial Use
Registered OSCAR users with active subscriptions will receive access to the latest distributions of the OSCAR simulation library, which includes OSCAR simulator binaries, header files for compilation of models with OSCAR, and documentation, packaged as shared library, and a license to
- royalty free subscription license to use the OSCAR simulation library to build their own simulators,
- perpetual license to run royalty free an unlimited number of compiled OSCAR simulators,
- perpetual license to distribute royalty free an unlimited number of compiled OSCAR simulators to other third parties in binary form.
Access to the OSCAR distributions and use for development is limited to the term of active subscription, but your use of the compiled OSCAR simulators is perpetual and extends perpetually beyond the active support period.
Commercial Support and Maintenance
Registered OSCAR users will have access to an online support help line, including a portal to send enquiries, lodge bug or problem reports, request additional support, training, consultation or other help.
Higher levels of support and custom support are also available on request.
Easy Site Deployment and Maintenance
Since OSCAR binaries are packaged as shared library, and backwards compatibility is guaranteed, it is easy to deploy and maintain simulators based on OSCAR — no more rebuilding required. In centralised site installations, an update of OSCAR can be as easy as running a new installer. On Windows, the use of a shared library for the SystemC kernel also enables building models separately from each other — again, no rebuilding required if models are re-used from one simulator or virtual platform to the next.
Please refer to the OSCAR User Guide for more details.
