Synthesisable building blocks jumpstart designs

The latest version of Cynthesizer is billed as the first high-level synthesis product to offer a direct path from high-level SystemC to GDSII.

Forte Design Systems has created a new version of its Cynthesizer SystemC synthesis product.

Cynthesizer v3.3 is the first high-level synthesis product to offer a direct path from high-level SystemC to GDSII by integrating Cynthesizer and Magma Design Automation's Blast Create synthesis technology and Blast Fusion place-and-route technology.

The latest release also adds SystemC behavioural design IP, a graphical analysis environment, and other features for better quality of results (QoR).

"Having a direct link from SystemC algorithms to GDSII provides designers with a significant advantage in time to high quality results", says Sean Dart, Forte's President and CEO.

"Our new CynWare IP library and tight integrations with partner products provide customers the fastest path from algorithms to first-time production silicon".

With Forte's integration of Cynthesizer and Magma's Blast Create, designers can take high-level SystemC code and go straight to GDSII, giving them accurate timing and area estimation as early as possible in the design process.

Designers can use SystemC for architectural exploration and immediately assess which design will give the best place and route (P and R) utilisation.

With a few simple configuration settings, designers can automatically use Blast Create to synthesise the Verilog RTL generated by Cynthesizer to a gate-level netlist, and use Magma's Blast Fusion for placement and routing.

At higher levels of abstraction there are less specific implementation details available.

Based on feedback from the P and R process, Cynthesizer's timing parameters can be further constrained to meet the implementation requirements without rewriting the original source code.

The Cynthesizer SystemC to GDSII flow provides designers with the values of the higher abstraction level while retaining the implementation detail and accuracy.

With Cynthesizer v3.3, Forte is releasing its CynWare SystemC IP library, giving designers synthesisable building blocks to jumpstart their designs.

Since these pre-designed elements are implementation independent, they are retargetable to different processes or QoR targets without performance or area penalties.

The result is truly reusable design IP that accelerates the design and verification process.

The CynWare IP library currently contains synthesisable: floating-point datatypes available in IEEE754 single and double precision as well as other combinations of exponent and mantissa width defined by the user; fixed-point datatypes; basic connectivity interfaces such as streaming data, FIFO-based and memory interfaces; and master and slave bus interfaces for connection using the Amba AHB.

Transaction-level models (TLM) for fast simulation speeds are included for all interface IP.

Other new features and improvements include the Cynthesizer Workbench - a graphical interactive analysis environment that provides a number of different data views including detailed analysis of the control and data flow, register usage, and other hardware details all linked to annotated source code views.

Cross-linked views make it easy to analyse details of the design to understand implementations tradeoffs and make changes for better QoR.

Advanced control of output port timing allows various output port timing and register scenarios to be defined, providing fine control over the exact circuit built to drive the output port and its timing.

Timing aggressiveness control allows designers to specify the level of timing aggressiveness used when processing the design with a single simple control.

And improvements to the underlying scheduling algorithms allow Cynthesizer to better implement designs that include conditional access to multiple memories to reduce overall design latency.

Cynthesizer v3.3 is immediately available to existing customers without cost.

The CynWare IP library has several components some of which are included as part of the Cynthesizer product.

Others are priced on a per project basis.

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