Press Releases
Support CriticalBlue's Cascade Tool Within Their Standard Implementation Flows
San Jose, California – May 19, 2004 – Completing the integration of its technology into standard SoC implementation tool flows, CriticalBlue, a start-up focused on delivering tools for accelerating software in embedded microprocessor applications, has announced the integration of its Cascade technology into standard implementation flows featuring tools from Synplicity (Nasdaq: SYNP), Cadence Ò (NYSE: CDN) and other leading EDA tool vendors. The Cascade tool flow into the Synplicity product family has been proven on three demonstrator projects. This integration work will ensure that CriticalBlue's technology fits smoothly within industry standard development and verification environments for embedded software and hardware implementation.
"We have been working with CriticalBlue for well over a year now and we have been impressed with the technology roadmap for the Cascade product line," said Bob Erickson, VP Engineering, Synplicity. "We believe that the Cascade technology is compatible with both traditional FPGA users and those who are adopting structured ASICs. In both cases embedded software is the starting point for much of the functionality that ends up in hardware on these classes of designs."
The adoption of new design methodologies, requiring users either to learn a new language, coding style, compiler, or debugger introduces a significant learning curve and limits the speed and quantum of advantage that can be gained. Cascade replaces today's manual methodologies by automatically architecting a coprocessor based on the output of standard software development environments - executable code - and producing the input to standard hardware design environments (RTL). The completion of the flows with the major implementation tool vendors such as Synplicity will establish that end users can benefit from CriticalBlue's technology in a very short timescale.
"Software, and legacy software in particular, is something that we know our customers are dealing with on a day-to-day basis. In many SoC projects more than 50 percent of the resources are software developers," said Mitch Weaver, general manager, Systems & Functional Verification Division, Cadence Design Systems, Inc. "Cascade offers a synthesis technology from compiled software, which feeds the hardware implementation and verification flow. This is an original technique and is very compatible with our Incisive Ô functional verification platform."
SW to HW in the Implementation Tool Flow
Today's SoC designers must make an initial decision between implementing each function as embedded software on a RISC, DSP core, or as custom datapath hardware. Detailed partitioning and implementation of dedicated hardware is a time consuming and expensive process. A software to hardware migration path is a vital capability in today's dynamic market allowing for the rapid creation of faster, cheaper, more flexible or lower power derivative products.
"The challenge facing engineers and management is how to adopt new technologies and gain the benefits quickly," said David Stewart , CEO, CriticalBlue. "The Cascade tool has been designed with the complete end user development environment in mind. During the development of our demonstrator systems, we proved that it was straightforward to pass design and verification data from Cascade into the synthesis flow provided by Synplicity's Synplify Pro® and Synplify ASIC® tools. We are repeating that success through validating Cascade inside other leading implementation flows." .3639.
During the demonstrator projects, Cascade generated synthesizable RTL and associated synthesis scripts targeted towards a Xilinx ® Virtex-I I T M device. Cascade also produced a testbench, which was used to verify the coprocessor implementation with the same stimuli and expected responses as those of the main processor, ensuring functional equivalence. Synplify Pro® synthesized the RTL and simulation was used to verify both the function and performance of the resulting coprocessor before it was programmed onto a real FPGA platform. Additionally, the design was re-targeted towards an advanced TSMC ASIC process and synthesized using the Synplify ASIC® tool . The demonstrator projects have not only shown that Cascade can interface to industry standard implementation flows such as those delivered by synplicity, but have proven a close correlation between the implementation area and performance results compared to the those predicted by Cascade.
About Cascade
Cascade gives design teams working with new and legacy embedded software the ability to capitalize on existing hardware and software development infrastructure investments. Its ability to offload and migrate software functions to an automatically generated and tuned hardware coprocessor supports the designer's need to increase performance, to reduce power consumption or to free up execution time on the main processor.
Cascade is a self-contained coprocessor synthesis tool not dependent upon a particular implementation language or coding style, and not requiring its own processor tool chain. Cascade's ability to import and extract parallelism from executable code enables a designer to use the full power of standard embedded software languages such as C and C++, providing a migration path directly across from implemented software to implemented hardware. Once identified and offloaded from the main processor, Cascade is able to generate RTL for the coprocessor hardware, microcode for its software and verification output to show that the functionality of the original software has been preserved. The resulting coprocessor architecture is automatically optimized for the task(s) being accelerated, producing a microcoded machine which is tuned by specific constraints applied by the user.
About Cadence
Cadence is the largest supplier of electronic design technologies and engineering services. Cadence solutions are used to accelerate and manage the design of semiconductors, computer systems, networking and telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics, and a variety of other electronics-based products. With approximately 4,800 employees and 2003 revenues of approximately $1.1 billion, Cadence has sales offices, design centers, and research facilities around the world. The company is headquartered in San Jose , Calif. , and traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CDN. More information about the company, its products, and services is available at www.cadence.com.
About CriticalBlue
CriticalBlue is focused on delivering tools for accelerating software in embedded microprocessor applications to key design houses and semiconductor vendors in the telecommunication, automotive and multimedia industries. The Cascade tool suite provides a broader range of implementation options within existing electronic design flows, as well as minimizing risk and development time. This is achieved by analyzing application software and automatically generating an appropriate coprocessor, designed to accelerate tasks written for a general-purpose microprocessor.
About Synplicity
Synplicity® Inc. (Nasdaq: SYNP) is a leading supplier of innovative synthesis, verification and physical implementation software solutions that enable the rapid and effective design and verification of semiconductors. Synplicity's high-quality, high-performance tools significantly reduce costs and time-to-market for FPGA, Structured/Platform ASIC and cell-based/COT ASIC designers. The company's underlying Behavior Extracting Synthesis Technology® (BEST™), which is embedded in its logical, physical and verification tools, and has led to Synplicity's top position in FPGA synthesis, now provides the same fast runtimes and quality of results to ASIC and COT customers. The company's fast, easy-to-use products support industry standard design languages (VHDL and Verilog) and run on popular platforms. Synplicity employs over 270 people in its 20 facilities worldwide. Synplicity is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For more information visit www.synplicity.com.
For more information, visit www.criticalblue.com or contact:
David Stewart
CriticalBlue
+1 408 467 5091
Leslie Cumming
Skye Marketing Communications
+ 1 415 285 2352