May 10, 2004 -- Forte Design Systems has introduced Cynthesizer, the first behavioral synthesis product to offer an implementation path from SystemC to RTL, verification, and co-simulation. Cynthesizer accelerates RTL delivery for integrated circuits and systems-on-chip by automatically generating optimized RTL code from a C++ / SystemC algorithmic description.

"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."

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.

Using un-timed high-level SystemC models, Cynthesizer automatically builds 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 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.

Forte has also announced two new Cynthesizer customers: Ricoh and Sony. Cynthesizer is already being used for production designs.

Pricing and Availability