Product Brief
Forte beefs up high-level synthesis tool
6/29/2009 3:12 PM EDT
The latest release of the product incorporates several new features, including SystemC 2.2 support, tools for partitioning complex hierarchical systems, automated generation of complex interfaces, enhanced control-based design support, memory support upgrades and scalability improvements, Forte (San Jose, Calif.) said.
Also Monday, Mentor Graphics Corp., Forte's chief competitor in HLS, announced several extensions to its Capapult C Synthesis tool to support full-chip HLS. While Catapult C enables designers to use the ANSI C++ programming language for both algorithmic blocks and control logic blocks, Cynthesizer lets designers choose either SystemC 2.1v1 or the latest SystemC 2.2 IEEE standard, Forte said.
According to Bret Cline, Forte's vice president of marketing and sales, the use of different languages is one of the major differentiators between Mentor's offering and Cynthesizer. While Mentor is offering proprietary extensions to improve Catapult C, Cline said, Forte has worked for years worked with the SystemC community and working groups.
"History in EDA has proven that you are better off sticking with standards," Cline said. "We really are trying to be open—open in the front and open in the back. We aren't trying to lock you into some proprietary flow."
Cline said SystemC has a standardized means of representing hardware concepts not available in pure ANSI-C solutions such as concurrency, bit accuracy, timing and hierarchy. Forte maintains that designs modeled behaviorally in SystemC are faster than RTL simulations and more accurate than ANSI-C based models.
Comments
Shawn McCloud
7/1/2009 7:48 PM EDT
Brett Cline of Forte made several comments about Mentor Catapult C in this article. Some of them were confusing or misinformed, so it is important to set the record straight.
COMMENT#1: Forte's own research says that the two companies are at worst equal in market share.
MISLEADING: Gary Smith has been THE analyst reporting on EDA market share since the 1990s for independent, unbiased analysis. The upfront and ratable reporting methods average out over time, and for 3 years running, Gary has reported Mentors Catapult C Synthesis is the market leader. Catapult has 100+ customers which include Ericsson, Fujitsu Microelectronics, Thales, Pioneer, Telegent, Elektrobit, Sanyo, Fraunhofer, Toshiba Information Systems, Panasonic, Alcatel, STMicroelectronics, Fuji Xerox, Siemens, Konica Minolta, Qualcomm.
COMMENT#2: Mentor is offering proprietary extensions to improve Catapult C
FALSE: Mentor is focused on supporting standards. Catapults source is pure C++ meaning it can be compiled and executed with any ANSI C++ compiler (GCC, Visual C++, etc). We also generate OSCI compliant SystemC as well as IEEE compliant Verilog and VHDL.
COMMENT#3: Designs modeled behaviorally in SystemC are more accurate than ANSI-C based models.
FALSE: Both pure ANSI C++ and SystemC can model functionally accurate designs. The ANSI C++ source that Catapult uses is numerically precise and functionally equivalent to the generated RTL.
THANK YOU DYLAN for taking the time to cover these high level synthesis announcements!
Regards,
Shawn McCloud
Mentor Graphics
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