Transaction level modeling in practice: Motivation and introduction

Electronic System Level design has gained momentum in recent years and has found its way into industrial main stream. Using mobile phone platforms we identify historic and upcoming trends in system design. Virtual prototyping has become our main tool to attack the resulting design challenges. This methodology has direct implications on development flow and team setup. We explain basic concepts of transaction level modeling and highlight selected facets of our modeling practice. This is the introductory contribution to the tutorial System Level Design-An Industrial Perspective. A number of topics which are just touched in this paper are elaborated in dedicated focus contributions. The respective references are particularly emphasized by the triangle symbol.