Synthesis tool wins EE Times' product award

SystemCrafter and Orange Tree Technologies' SystemC to VHDL synthesis package has won the Ultimate Products award, as voted by readers of the EE Times eeProductcentre.

SystemCrafter and Orange Tree Technologies' SystemC to VHDL synthesis package has won the Ultimate Products award, as voted by readers of the EE Times eeProductcentre.

EE Times readers were asked to score products introduced in Q1 2005 based on technical significance and usability.

Over 1000 readers contributed to this ranking process, and they chose SystemCrafter SC as the most technically significant in its category.

Readers say 'it has the potential to be disruptive in the market'; 'with this tool, programming VHDL is no longer somebody's special trick'; 'price/performance is significantly improved'; 'very important tool for those who have just a rudimentary knowledge of VHDL, at a very low price point'; 'great price for a cool idea'; 'larger companies' products are very expensive'; and '[works with] standard work environments and tools'.

Dr Jonathan Saul, SystemCrafter CEO, commented: "We are delighted that SystemCrafter SC has been recognised by the readers of EE Times, and this award is a great boost for everyone who is working hard to develop the tool further".

"Our vision is to provide a tool which can bridge the gap between SystemC and VHDL, at an affordable price".

"This not only enables system-level designers to implement their designs quickly and reliably, but also opens up the use of FPGAs to a new market of C and C++ programmers".

SystemCrafter SC automatically synthesises hardware designs written in SystemC to VHDL.

This VHDL can then be used with commonly available tools to target Xilinx FPGAs.

This enables engineers and programmers to design, debug and simulate hardware and systems using their existing C++ development environment.

The price of SystemCrafter SC is only $2995 for a perpetual node-locked licence.

A free evaluation version can be downloaded from the company's web site and used for 30 days.

Discounts are available for students and universities.

There is a natural synergy between SystemCrafter's software and FPGA development boards.

If you have SystemCrafter SC installed, and an FPGA development board plugged into your computer, you can literally go from an empty C++ project to working hardware prototype in hours.

SystemCrafter SC is available with the ZestSC1 FPGA development board developed by Orange Tree Technologies.

This board has a High Speed 480Mbits/s USB interface.

The FPGA is the Xilinx Spartan-3 with up to one million logic gates, and there is also up to 8Mbytes of SRAM.

The board is provided with full software support for Windows XP and 2000, together with example logic cores for all the FPGA interfaces for use with SystemCrafter SC.

The price for Zest SC1 is from $275, depending on FPGA type and memory size.

About SystemC SystemC is a worldwide standard for modelling hardware and software systems using the C/C++ language with a library for hardware constructs.

As well as allowing hardware and software to be simulated in the same framework, it is also more compact than VHDL or Verilog.

It is faster to write, and more maintainable and readable, and can be compiled into an executable specification for fast simulation.

Back to top