Hello and welcome to CynCity, the all new Forte Design Systems blog located here at http://cyncity.forteds.com. We are doing this so we can share our ideas with you more publicly – ideas we think you should consider in the fast-evolving world of high-level design. Forte now has a decade of experience helping people achieve great results. We hope that you will find CynCity to be both entertaining and informative, and above all, give you a clearer understanding of innovative approaches to design techniques and methodologies.
For our inaugural blog posting, I thought there was no better place to start than at the beginning.
Forte was founded on a vision with 4 core beliefs:
- Abstraction – critical to improve the productivity and maintainability of new designs.
- Verification – an essential component of any design solution.
- Quality Silicon – tight coupling to downstream tools to produce high-quality results.
- Standards – support for standard languages is best for our customers and our industry as a whole.
In 2001 we introduced Cynthesizer to the market, the first SystemC-based high-level synthesis tool. Cynthesizer raised the level of abstraction for designers, but it also delivered a series of verification integrations that made it easier for customers to adopt this new, high-level design flow. We chose SystemC at the time because it was the clear momentum winner in C++ modeling for EDA, and have since evolved that standard through technical and executive participation in the OSCI standards body. We also provided very close ties to existing silicon implementation flows (starting with logic synthesis tools) and tight integration of specialized datapath engines for generation of high-performance, quality silicon.
Our approach seems to be working. Cynthesizer has rapidly been adopted by the world’s leading electronics companies and our online Cynthesizer Knowledge Base now has over 600 users.
Things got even better last September when we acquired the CellMath Designer (CMD) technologies from Arithmatica. This brought to Forte a very high-performance datapath optimization technology, a number of world-class IP blocks and a team of world-renowned datapath experts. This step exemplifies our commitment to a core belief in quality silicon.
One of the challenges Forte faces, as a small company, is the fear on the part of designers to be “the guinea pig” – a fear of being the first user of new technology that might not work. Rest easy. Cynthesizer and CMD have both been through the ringer, having been used by many customers to tape out numerous designs. If you go to your local electronics store and buy a digital camera, TV, printer, MP3 player or one of the most popular smart phones on the market, chances are you will walk out holding a piece of hardware that was designed with a Forte product.
Each month we plan to bring you all kinds of helpful information no matter what your current tools or usage may be. If you are an existing Forte customer, we’ll help you get the most out of Cynthesizer and CMD to do things like create complex line buffer interfaces, get that external memory interface synthesized or design with floating-point data types. If you are a user of a competing high-level design tool, we hope to challenge some of the restrictions we know you are facing and point out ways you could achieve better results. And if you’re new to high-level synthesis but don’t know where to start, we’ll give you the information you need to examine your current design approaches and ask yourself a few tough questions that we’ve already solved.
If you’ve read other blogs or message boards, you’ve heard a lot of banter and conflicting opinions about high-level synthesis. Should I use SystemC or ANSI C? How exactly do I verify the results? What do I do with the RTL you generate? How do I analyze what you’ve done with my code? What about control-oriented designs? What about low power and ECOs?
It’s okay. We hear this all the time and you’ll see the answers right here on CynCity.
So welcome again. Please take a moment to bookmark this page and sign up for an email subscription. This way you’ll get the most out of your experience with Cynthesizer and CellMath Designer.
And, as always, we’re here to listen. If you have topics you would like to see covered or any suggestions to make our blog as usable as possible for you, don’t hesitate to send your ideas to us at cyncity@forteds.com.
