Date: 13/12/2010

Fujitsu Semiconductor selects Forte Design Systems' SystemC HL Synthesis software

Forte Design Systems has announced its Cynthesizer high-level synthesis software has been selected for use in Fujitsu Semiconductor Limited's application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) Reference Flow for the new 40-nanometer (nm) process technologies, along with 90- and 65nm. Forte and Fujitsu Semiconductor will jointly develop the high-level synthesis library for the latest technology.

"Forte continues to prove its value as a provider of high-level synthesis," remarks Takashi Hasegawa, general manager, SoC Solutions Division, Fujitsu Semiconductor Limited. "Cynthesizer met or exceeded our stringent requirements, giving internal and external design teams a SystemC-based, high-level synthesis tool for register transfer level sign off."

"It gives us a great deal of pleasure to be working with Fujitsu Semiconductor, a company with forward-thinking initiatives," says Sean Dart, president and chief executive officer of Forte Design Systems. "Fujitsu Semiconductor recognized early on that in order to improve time to market and design quality, it needed to deploy a SystemC-based high-level synthesis tool like Cynthesizer."

Forte says its flagship Cynthesizer SystemC-based high-level synthesis software has been used for more than 300 production ASIC and system-on-chip (SoC) silicon tapeouts since 2002.
Designers create abstracted models of their hardware using a high-level SystemC description. Cynthesizer processes the SystemC model, automatically creating the datapath and finite state machine. Designers can easily generate a number of candidate register transfer level (RTL) implementations by varying tool directives to specify latency, performance or area constraints, adds Forte.