Date: 06/09/2010

Toshiba selects Mentor's synthesis tool for ASIC audio, communication and image processing systems

Mentor Graphics has announced that Toshiba has expanded their adoption and deployment of the Catapult C tool for the high-level synthesis (HLS) of next generation application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for audio, communication and image processing systems.

Mentor says that Toshiba has chosen and deployed the Catapult C Synthesis tool because they believe that RTL-based design creation is not productive, and a shift to a methodology based on untimed C++/SystemC is necessary. This shift, which is facilitated by the Catapult C tool, addresses the need for full-chip synthesis by providing a platform for a multi-language, multi-abstraction approach to high-level synthesis.

"What makes our products stand out in the marketplace is the quality and sophistication of the functionality within," said Tomoji Takada, General Manager, LSI Solutions Division, Toshiba Information Systems (JAPAN) Corporation. "With Catapult C, our engineering teams spend less time working on the implementation details and more time where it matters most, innovating and differentiating our products by creating sophisticated algorithms and tuning the hardware architecture for specific design and technology goals."

"Our design teams have become quite familiar and comfortable with using the Catapult C tool for design exploration and for creating RTL code from the C-based functional descriptions," said Akiyoshi Ohguro, Group Leader, LSI Design Center Dpt.1, LSI Solutions Division, Toshiba Information Systems (JAPAN) Corporation. "Our last project was fairly complex in nature, but the Catapult C tool made the process of implementing and verifying our functionality very manageable. Starting from high-level C++ code, we were able to explore various implementation options for the 8X8 matrix of eigenvalue decomposition algorithm that is at the heart of our FocusNavi product. We were able to improve the overall latency performance by a factor of five while keeping the same frequency (100MHz) and area (50K ASIC gate count). This was possible all because of high-level synthesis."

The high-level synthesis flow starts from much more abstract representations in C, C++ or SystemC. Through user-driven constraints, high-level synthesis tools such as Catapult C can automatically add the necessary concurrency and implementation details followed by generation of correct-by-construction RTL code.

"Toshiba Information Systems (JAPAN) Corporation continues to be one of the most innovative systems houses in Japan," said Simon Bloch, Vice President and General Manager, Design and Synthesis division at Mentor. "We are fortunate to work with such an influential company, and to learn time and time again that the Catapult C tool delivers exceptional Quality of Results (QoR) allowing customers like Toshiba to differentiate their products with much less risk and far less time versus traditional hand-coded RTL flows."