The idea is that data is provided which allows the designer to fully understand the numerical behavior of the system and its constituent parts at whatever layer of granularity is preferred. The collaboration establishes a de-facto modeling standard for the benefit of the entire electronics industry. There is broad and growing support for SystemC from leading companies in the semiconductor, electronic systems, IP, EDA and embedded software industries. Fixed-Point data types are implemented in SystemC release 1.0. They have been crafted using accepted format styles and including a rich set of parameters to cover all cases of quantization and overflow handling.
Global annotation is used in cases where no local annotation is present.
Where local annotation is present, global annotation is ignored. In either case, the parameters can subsequently be further refined by the user. Anytime during the conversion process, the intermediate code is always executable. The final step in the conversion process is to generate fully fixed-point executable code. The user interface allows control of the simulation and code building tools in addition to the data conversion functions.