According to Kamal Aggarwal, SoftJin's vice president of marketing and strategy, PSE provides a building block for development of synthesis tools for FPGA, structured ASIC and other programmable fabrics, much as the company's Nirmaan 2 toolkit provides a building block for post-layout EDA development tools.

SoftJin (Bangalore, India) plans to market the tool to programmable platform vendors, who can then use it to provide customers with design tools customized to their specific architectures, Aggarwal said.

SoftJin describes PSE as a customizable engine that allows users to derive the most from the underlying architecture of a programmable platform. The company claims that PSE delivers better results than traditional FPGA and ASIC synthesis tools. SoftJin customizes each PSE to specific programmable platform architecture and for integration with placement and routing tools, the company said.

PSE can be licensed by programmable platform vendors for use by their customers or can be licensed by system-level EDA companies that want to extend offerings into the RTL domain, SoftJin said.

SoftJin said it also offers PSE customization and integration services, whereby SoftJin takes the responsibility of customizing PSE for a programmable platform vendor's architecture and integrating PSE with downstream placement and routing tools.

PSE features a technology mapper that implements optimized abstract logic and abstract sequential elements present in the input onto target technology, SoftJin said. In addition, the tool offers a module generator that recognizes and maps a variety of higher-level primitives, according to the company.

PSE is available for beta evaluation now and is licensed as object code to programmable platform vendors and ESL tool vendors. The annual license fee varies depending on the underlying architecture of the programmable platform, but Aggarwal said the median price for the tool is roughly $100,000 per year. SoftJin plans to demonstrate PSE at the Design Automation Conference here next week, the company said.