CIE Components in Electronics
Cadence Design Systems has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Forte Design Systems, a provider of SystemC-based high-level synthesis (HLS) and arithmetic IP. The addition of Forte’s synthesis and IP products to the Cadence C-to-Silicon Compiler offering will enable Cadence to further drive a SystemC standard flow for design and multi-language verification.
The acquisition comes at a time of increasing IP complexity and the need for rapid retargeting of IP to derivative architectures. In response the high-level synthesis market segment has grown beyond early adopters toward mainstream adoption, as design teams migrate from hand-coded RTL design to SystemC-based design and verification.
“Growth in the high-level synthesis market segment is accelerating”, said Charlie Huang, senior vice president of the System & Verification Group and Worldwide Field Operations at Cadence. “HLS tools are now addressing a broader application space and producing equal or better quality of results than hand-coded RTL, fuelling worldwide adoption and production deployment amongst leading companies. We look forward to welcoming Forte’s technology and skilled team to Cadence to help address this opportunity.”
Forte brings high quality of results (QoR) for datapath-centric designs, world-class arithmetic IP, valuable SystemC IP and IP development tools. The company’s Cynthesizer HLS product features strong support for memory scheduling, especially for highly parallel or pipelined designs. These strengths complement the high QoR for transaction-level modeling, under-the-hood RTL synthesis and incremental ECO support featured by Cadence C-to-Silicon Compiler.
“Cadence and Forte have compatible approaches to high-level synthesis, and a similar vision to enable migration of design to the system level,” said Sean Dart, CEO of Forte. “Customer will benefit from a standardised system-level flow, improved product capabilities for both customer bases, and integration all the way to silicon.”
The acquisition is expected to close by the end of March.
