Forte Design Systems Becomes First High-Level Synthesis Software Provider to Support IEEE 1666-2011 SystemC

“Today’s design teams need every advantage to beat market pressures,” says Mike Meredith, Forte’s vice president of technical marketing. “We began implementing the new SystemC language standard as soon as the language reference manual was available to ensure our users had the most up-to-date and advanced language and tools possible.”

The latest version of Cynthesizer supports the new SystemC syntax for asynchronous resets. The new language support for reset semantics in SC_THREADs allows hardware designers to implement synthesizable designs using the same process construct commonly used for transaction-level system modeling. The result is improved interoperability between models used for implementation, system modeling and hardware/software co-design.

In addition to these synthesis-related benefits, use of IEEE 1666-2011 SystemC gives Cynthesizer users access to process control extensions for modeling embedded software systems, the integrated TLM-2.0 library and features for pausing and restarting simulation.

Approved by the IEEE in February 2012, the upgraded language standard adds features for high-level synthesis and high-level system modeling. The first simulation library implementation was released in open-source by the Accellera Systems Initiative in July 2012.

Forte’s portfolio of HLS products will be demonstrated February 26-27 from 3:30 p.m. until 6:30 p.m. at DVCon 2013 at the Doubletree Hotel in San Jose, Calif.

Gary Smith EDA, the leading provider of market intelligence and advisory services for the global Electronic Design Automation (EDA) market, recognized Forte as the #1 provider of electronic system-level (ESL) synthesis software in late 2012. At 36%, Forte led a market segment that included three other vendors.