SAN FRANCISCO—High-level synthesis (HLS) EDA vendor Forte Design Systems has commenced volume shipments of the latest version of its Cynthesizer SystemC synthesis software for hardware and electronic system level (ESL) design, the company said Monday (June 29).
The latest release of the product incorporates several new features, including SystemC 2.2 support, tools for partitioning complex hierarchical systems, automated generation of complex interfaces, enhanced control-based design support, memory support upgrades and scalability improvements, Forte (San Jose, Calif.) said.
Also Monday, Mentor Graphics Corp., Forte's chief competitor in HLS, announced several extensions to its Capapult C Synthesis tool to support full-chip HLS. While Catapult C enables designers to use the ANSI C++ programming language for both algorithmic blocks and control logic blocks, Cynthesizer lets designers choose either SystemC 2.1v1 or the latest SystemC 2.2 IEEE standard, Forte said.
According to Bret Cline, Forte's vice president of marketing and sales, the use of different languages is one of the major differentiators between Mentor's offering and Cynthesizer. While Mentor is offering proprietary extensions to improve Catapult C, Cline said, Forte has worked for years worked with the SystemC community and working groups.
"History in EDA has proven that you are better off sticking with standards," Cline said. "We really are trying to be open—open in the front and open in the back. We aren't trying to lock you into some proprietary flow."
Cline said SystemC has a standardized means of representing hardware concepts not available in pure ANSI-C solutions such as concurrency, bit accuracy, timing and hierarchy. Forte maintains that designs modeled behaviorally in SystemC are faster than RTL simulations and more accurate than ANSI-C based models.
