News Release from: Forte Design Systems
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 27 September 2005
Synthesis software boasts high quality of results
Forte Design Systems has upgraded its industry-leading Cynthesizer behavioural synthesis solution to provide a more extensive production ESL design flow.
Note: Readers of the Editor’s free email newsletter will have read this news when it was announced. . It’s free!
Forte Design Systems has upgraded its industry-leading Cynthesizer behavioural synthesis solution to provide a more extensive production ESL design flow. Forte's Cynthesizer v2.5 is available immediately, and supports power estimation, formal verification, modular interface IP, FPGA prototyping, and a comprehensive design reporting subsystem. The new capabilities give design teams early access to critical design information, ease the adoption of higher-level design, and further improve quality of results.
Through Forte's collaboration with Sequence Design, Cynthesizer customers now have the unique ability to easily and automatically measure power consumption at the RTL and gate level using Sequence's Powertheatre product.
By measuring power throughout the SystemC-to-netlist design process and reporting power estimates along with area and timing, users have the ability to trade off cost (area), performance, and power to achieve the right mix of RTL quality for their target application.
Designing interface protocols is both time-consuming and error-prone.
With the latest release of Cynthesizer, design teams can easily incorporate modular and configurable interfaces with their C, C++, and SystemC design models and ultimately create reusable interface IP.
Cynthesizer automatically produces an RTL hardware description with an optimal schedule and resource utilisation for the interface protocol being targeted.
Customers can then perform 'what-if' analysis for various interface options by simply changing the type declaration in their C code, which is often only a couple of lines of code.
In contrast, with traditional RTL methodologies this type of change can often cause several weeks of rework as the interface change is propagated through the design hierarchy.
Cynthesizer's modular interface capability allows more complete design exploration and significantly reduces the time to high-quality verified RTL.
Additionally, this capability greatly advances IP reuse for design teams by allowing them to reuse complex 'behavioural IP', regardless of interface changes, without major modification.
Cynthesizer v2.5 also includes support for RTL-to-gates formal verification with Cadence's Encounter Conformal Equivalence Checker.
Designers can now easily and automatically formally verify the optimised RTL created by Cynthesizer with their post-logic synthesis netlist results, providing a more robust netlist signoff flow.
This capability allows design teams to quickly integrate Cynthesizer into their existing ASIC and SoC design flows.
Forte has also added support for FPGA implementation targets, eliminating the need for several different RTL design versions for multiple devices and reducing the overall design and verification effort.
Cynthesizer users can now easily prototype their designs as FPGAs through a link with Synplicity's Synplify Pro, enabling fast RTL verification and early testing of new algorithms; they can later target an SoC/ASIC for high-volume production based on the same high-level SystemC model.
In Cynthesizer v2.5, Forte has introduced a wide variety of analysis capabilities, giving designers the ability to quickly visualise results and make better design decisions.
The HTML-based analysis subsystem allows designers to easily analyse their design, evaluate trade-offs, and achieve rapid closure.
The new analyses include: direct links from RTL hardware to the original C/C++/SystemC code; detailed cycle-by-cycle resource scheduling information; resource utilisation information; functional unit sharing; and custom reports through the user-extensible API.
These upgraded analysis capabilities further reduce the time spent in analysis and improve the time to high-quality RTL.
'With the growing adoption of Cynthesizer for production designs by major electronics companies, our customers are pushing the envelope with their demands for the critical functionality required both for broadening production use of ESL flows and for designing hardware at a higher level', said Brett Cline, Forte's Vice President of Customer Operations and Services and Corporate Communications.
'Forte has further extended Cynthesizer's existing technology lead by tackling issues such as power, IP reuse, and formal verification, which will further improve quality of results and the applicability of ESL in production design flows'.
• Forte Design Systems: contact details and other news
• Other news in Design and Development Software
• Email this news to a colleague
•
• RSS news feed for Forte Design Systems
• RSS news feed for Design and Development Software
• Electronicstalk Home Page
Copyright © 2000-2006 Pro-Talk Ltd, UK. Based on news supplied by Forte Design Systems - Subject: Cynthesizer v2.5
Click on the advertisement to visit the advertiser's web site now