"We want to promote Cynlib as a standard," said Sanguinetti. "If we put it out in the normal way, and licensed it for a fee, people would say they could do the same thing and do their own. Some would succeed, and we'd fragment the industry."

CynApps does, of course, need to make money, and the company intends to do so by building and selling a "hardware design environment for C++," Sanguinetti said. In late September, the company plans to roll out a compiler that will bridge the gap between C++ and the Verilog subset needed for synthesis.

CynApps may, however, be heading for competition with Synopsys in the C++ arena. According to reports in the E-Mail Synopsys User's Group, Synopsys privately demonstrated a C/C++ synthesis environment called "Scenery" at the Design Automation Conference in June.

Cynlib and Scenery clash?

Brian Barrera, strategic marketing director for system-level design at Synopsys, declined to comment directly on Scenery, but he reiterated Synopsys' viewpoint that C++ is the "only realistic candidate" for a system-level design language.

Cynlib, announced in June, is a class library that lets users describe hardware features in C++. It includes a fast, cycle-accurate simulation kernel, making it possible to simulate down to the register-transfer level using nothing more than Cynlib and the free GNU C++ compiler.

The startup's open-source approach claims endorsements from several companies, including Magma Design Automation, SureFire Verification, Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems.

SureFire itself has had a successful experience with its open-source Verilog EMACS editor. The company also makes a Verilog preprocessor available at from its site.

Cynlib will be made available under terms very similar to the Netscape Mozilla Public License model, Sanguinetti said. Under these terms, users can download, use and modify the source code as they see fit. Users cannot modify the class library and resell it, but they can use it to build models that are compiled and sold.Those terms are very close to the GNU Public License, Sanguinetti said, although they go a little further by allowing users to link proprietary code with the library.