Press Releases
CriticalBlue Releases Significant Update to Cascade Coprocessor Synthesis Solution
~30% lower gate count, ~50% less microcode, new customer driven features
San Jose, California - July 13, 2006 - CriticalBlue, a provider of tools for accelerating software in embedded microprocessor applications has announced the immediate availability of Cascade Version 2.1, its coprocessor synthesis solution. Cascade 2.1 includes significant new product features that have been developed to meet customer demand, delivering smaller silicon footprints for resulting coprocessors and further integration with existing customer flows and methods.
"Cascade 2.1 is a significant milestone. This release delivers a variety of new features needed by customers using Cascade in production projects, and also contains fundamental improvements to the underlying patented architectural synthesis algorithms. We have now synthesized coprocessors as small as 32K gates," stated David Stewart, CEO, CriticalBlue. "Release 2.1 makes Cascade a highly productive solution for taking regular embedded software and ensuring that its execution meets the conflicting demands of power consumption, area, performance and programmability targets."
Delivering exploration options
Cascade's coprocessor synthesis boosts embedded systems processing performance by creating a loosely coupled programmable coprocessor that accelerates the execution of compiled binary executable software code offloaded from the main processor in the system. Design space exploration is increasingly being seen by CriticalBlue's customers as a key differentiating capability of the solution. Cascade 2.1 allows fast exploration of many different architectural variants, platform options and software-hardware partitions to be made without modification to the application software and without knowledge of processor design. Given the compressed development time schedules experienced by customers using Cascade, up-front and rapid design space exploration is becoming a key capability in any design team's toolkit.
Coprocessor synthesis is typically used by customers who wish to accelerate new or legacy embedded software performance, reduce platform power consumption for a given performance point, add longevity to a silicon platform through the ability to reprogram it, or support multiple algorithms in a single programmable accelerator block.
"CriticalBlue's solution is favorably aligned with the three key trends in the semiconductor industry: product differentiation, escalating costs, and programmer-enabled solutions. Using Cascade, developers can build designs that are both faster and more power-efficient than a general-purpose processor, but are generic in manufacture and still customizable in the field. Importantly, customization doesn't require logic design skills and knowledge of computer architecture; Cascade is accessible to programmers." commented Nick Tredennick, Contributing Editor, Gilder Technology Report.
Cascade 2.1 Feature Updates
New features and benefits that have been added to Cascade version 2.1 include:
- Reduced Microcode Size by ~50%, enabling lower cache and code storage requirements and thus preserving silicon area.
- Reduced Logic area by ~30%, enabling end users to preserve silicon area
- Increased choice of Candidate Architectures, enabling end users to quickly and easily explore the full extremes of the available design space.
- AHB Bus Mastering, enabling the synthesized coprocessor to completely manage the data flow to and from main memory.
- CoWare ConvergenSC Interface, enabling end users to verify their complete platform design easily using CoWare's ESL simulation environment.
- Configurable Data Cache Line lengths, enabling the user to optimize this parameter for their application requirements.
- ARM Thumb Interoperability Support, enabling end users to make use of the compactness of the Thumb executable while still being able to automatically use Cascade to generate coprocessors.
- Volatile Memory Support, enabling hardware peripherals or uncached memory areas to be efficiently directly accessed by the coprocessor
The above features are a pragmatic set of capabilities required by customers to practically apply Cascade coprocessor synthesis in real life projects. Cascade is rigorously and regularly validated in a multi-platform regression environment containing well over 300 testcases.
About CriticalBlue
CriticalBlue delivers Cascade, a design tool that synthesizes optimized programmable coprocessors to accelerate embedded software within platform SoCs. Cascade analyses executable software code to accelerate identified functions by offloading those functions from the main processor onto a coprocessor. It then automatically creates a broad range of coprocessor architecture and implementation options to enable designers to achieve the requisite performance, area and power trade-offs, while minimizing project risk and development time. Cascade is used by both semiconductor and system design companies. For more information visit www.criticalblue.com.
For more information, please contact:
David Stewart
CriticalBlue
+1 408 467 5091
Leslie Cumming
Skye Marketing Communications
+ 1 415 285 2352