Three Leading Electronics Companies adopt Cynthesizer for Behavioral Design
SAN JOSE, Calif., May 10 /PRNewswire/ -- Forte Design Systems today
announced Cynthesizer, the first behavioral synthesis product to offer an
implementation path from SystemC to RTL, verification, and co-simulation.
Cynthesizer accelerates RTL delivery for leading-edge integrated circuits and
systems-on-chip by automatically generating optimized RTL code from a C++ /
SystemC algorithmic description.
Cynthesizer fills the productivity gap for hardware designers who are
struggling to create increasingly complex chips using previous generation RTL
methods. Designers are able to work at a higher level of abstraction with
Cynthesizer, reducing the amount of code necessary to describe and implement
design functionality.
"The critical enablers for the electronics industry's move to the next
design abstraction level are identical to those that enabled the transition
from gate-level to RTL: a viable language, simulation, and most importantly,
synthesis," said Jacob Jacobsson, Forte's president and chief executive
officer. "Forte's behavioral synthesis breakthrough enables the use of the
next level of design abstraction and serves as an ESL catalyst by surmounting
the complexity issues at 90 nm."
"With 10-100X fewer lines of code than RTL design, more and more project
teams are starting their hardware designs at the behavioral level using C/C++
algorithms and SystemC models," said Brett Cline, Marketing Vice President at
Forte. "With Cynthesizer, designers can take their existing algorithms and
automatically create verified high quality RTL implementations in days rather
than the months required with conventional RTL design."
Importance of Behavioral Synthesis
Current RTL design and refinement is time-consuming and error-prone with
the decreases in device geometries. More transistors are now available but
the resources required to evaluate multiple architectural choices and their
respective RTL configurations manually are prohibitive. It's becoming
impossible to design effectively and meet project deadlines. As a result,
designers risk locking into architectural and RTL design descriptions that
cannot be implemented, or do not meet the design objectives. Additionally,
inconsistent RTL coding styles and design approaches within a project team
amplify issues further downstream in the design flow, such as sub-optimal
logic synthesis results and timing closure problems.
Behavioral synthesis allows designers to quickly create hardware from un-
timed high-level models. These models accurately describe the function but do
not specifically schedule or allocate hardware resources as required when
using traditional RTL logic synthesis tools. With behavioral synthesis, design
teams create and verify their designs in an order of magnitude less time
because it eliminates the need to fully schedule and allocate design resources
with existing RTL methods.
Cynthesizer Features
Cynthesizer is the only behavioral synthesis tool to offer designers a
complete, automated path from high-level algorithms to RTL, including
synthesis, verification, and co-simulation. It will allow designers to
investigate and automatically validate multiple RTL implementations based on
user directives without modification to the original design.
As a result, designers can use Cynthesizer to automatically produce RTL in
days or weeks instead of months, with quality of results that often surpasses
that of hand coded RTL. Cynthesizer is delivering the foundation for a
synthesizable, routable design and ultimately silicon success.
Using un-timed high-level SystemC models, Cynthesizer is the first
behavioral synthesis product to automatically build a fully timed RTL hardware
implementation based on an external set of constraints created by the user.
Designers can easily and quickly make tradeoffs in chip performance and area
resulting in higher quality designs and superior IP reuse without modification
of the design source. Cynthesizer outputs industry-standard RTL specifically
targeted for a number of downstream flows and products, such as commonly used
simulators and logic synthesis tools. By using Cynthesizer to control and
customize the RTL results, designers eliminate many issues inherent to
conventional RTL design flows, such as design intent errors, poor quality of
results and timing closure problems.
Cynthesizer includes a unique combination of behavioral synthesis
functions: automation of tasks such as operation scheduling, cycle timing,
control and data path design, resource allocation and RTL generation.
Cynthesizer also includes a complete automation and verification package which
allows results to be immediately verified by reusing a test-bench with high-
level design models, generated RTL, and gate-level models.
Customer adoption
Forte is also announcing three new Cynthesizer customers: Fujitsu
Laboratories Ltd, Ricoh and Sony Corporation. Cynthesizer is already being
used for production designs.
"We're extremely happy to announce adoption of Cynthesizer by leading edge
companies such as Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., Ricoh and Sony Corporation," said
Jacob Jacobsson. "SystemC-based design with Cynthesizer is providing these
customers a path to high-quality silicon in a fraction of the time of RTL-
based design."
Pricing and Availability
Cynthesizer is available today on both Linux and Solaris platforms.
Pricing starts at $250,000 per year for a time-based license. Contact Forte
sales at sales@ForteDS.com for more information.
About Forte Design Systems
Forte Design Systems is a leading provider of software products that
enable design at a higher-level of abstraction. Forte's innovative Cynthesizer
behavioral synthesis product allows design teams creating complex electronic
systems from algorithmic designs using ASICs, SoCs, and FPGAs to significantly
reduce their overall design and verification time. Forte is headquartered at
100 Century Center Court, San Jose, CA 95112. For more information, visit us
at http://www.ForteDS.com or see us at DAC 2004 in San Diego, CA in booth 3820.
For more information, contact:
Brett Cline Gloria Nichols
Forte Design Systems Launch Marketing
978-264-1855 650-851-6919
brett@ForteDS.com gloria@launchm.com
SOURCE Forte Design Systems
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Related links:
http://www.forteds.com
CONTACT:
Brett Cline of Forte Design Systems,
+1-978-264-1855 or brett@ForteDS.com; or Gloria Nichols of Launch
Marketing, +1-650-851-6919 or gloria@launchm.com, for Forte
Design Systems
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