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Wireless devices have become ubiquitous. Everywhere you turn, there are
wireless devices in use, and more applications are built-in into these
wireless devices with each new generation. Combining applications into a
single device produces computational requirements that can easily
overwhelm the CPU if performed in software. Furthermore, a software
implementation is far less energy-efficient than hardware, and with
portable wireless devices, power is king.
The best solution is to move more functionality of the wireless
device into hardware. However, many wireless devices are being designed
to work with emerging standards -- standards that may change to some
extent before the device is rolled out to market. The traditional RTL
hardware design process requires a commitment to a specification early
in the design process. Changes to that specification can cost weeks or
months of delay in time-to-market because an expensive redesign is
required. Forte's Cynthesizer, connects the implementation of design
directly to the algorithms, by automatically synthesizing the complex
datapaths and state machines required to implement them. Then, when
changes are required during the design process, modifications to the
algorithm are easily accommodated and the hardware is automatically
re-synthesized.
There have been multiple production designs where this exact problem
was addressed with Cynthesizer. In each case, the algorithmic change was
made, verified, and re-synthesized to verified gates within days
(sometimes hours!). The impact of these changes to the RTL design
process was estimated to be weeks. Cynthesizer users have successfully
implemented algorithms for digital media and security applications for
wireless devices, Viterbi encoders and decoders, proprietary noise
rejection algorithms and others.
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