SAN JOSE, CALIF. -- September 28, 2009 --
Forte Design Systems announced
today that it has acquired Arithmatica, Ltd., provider of intellectual
property (IP) and datapath synthesis based in the United Kingdom, to
expand its product offerings and accelerate product development.
Terms of the acquisition will not be disclosed.
Forte will continue to develop and market Arithmatica's
CellMath(tm)
products, including direct support for
CellMath Designer(tm) (CMD) and
support for CellMath Optimizer(tm) (CMO) through its relationship with
Imagination Technologies. It will integrate Arithmatica's patented
technology and IP into its Cynthesizer(tm) SystemC high-level synthesis
(HLS) software to enhance quality of results (QoR).
Additionally, Forte will provide an upgrade path for design teams
using CellMath Designer directly to Cynthesizer to help them leverage
their existing design work.
"Forte remains committed to increasing the abstraction level of
hardware design, while at the same time staying firmly connected to the
silicon implementation flow," says Sean Dart, president and chief
executive officer (CEO) of Forte. "The Arithmatica acquisition
gives us both the tools and the expertise to expand our product offering
to achieve circuit quality that has not been possible before."
Adds Dan Ganousis, Arithmatica's president and CEO:
"Arithmatica has been focused on allowing design teams to build better
datapath blocks. As a part of Forte, Arithmatica-based design
teams will have a clear growth path to SystemC synthesis and will be
able to utilize the high-quality datapath blocks they have built using
CellMath Designer."
Currently, Forte has engineering, sales and support offices in the
United States, Europe, Japan and Korea. Its worldwide presence
will increase with the addition of an engineering group in England, a
design services team and a U.S. sales team led by Ganousis. The
combined company has customers in all major regions of the world,
including North America, Europe, Korea, Japan and Taiwan.
Design teams use CellMath Designer datapath synthesis to reduce area,
improve performance and lower power consumption for datapath-intensive
design blocks. Using CellMath IP, CellMath Designer combines
advanced synthesis techniques with datapath architectures to reduce
circuit area and power and for circuit speeds unachievable through other
means. CellMath Designer works in conjunction with general logic
synthesis products and utilizes existing register-transfer level (RTL)
code, synthesis scripts and technology libraries to allow designers to
quickly improve results.
Cynthesizer today supports both control- and datapath-intensive
designs from a single SystemC source without proprietary language
extensions. For datapath designs, Forte's patented DpOpt
technology will be enhanced with CellMath and Arithmatica IP.
Designers can designate specific portions of their design to be
synthesized as custom datapath components through the datapath
synthesizer. In addition, Cynthesizer can import custom parts
built with CellMath Designer, automatically recognize patterns and find
other opportunities to build additional custom parts. The creation
and use of these datapath parts allows Cynthesizer to produce smaller,
faster RTL designs.
"Imagination Technologies has used CellMath in several of our
market-dominating POWERVR graphics IP cores," comments Martin Ashton,
Imagination Technologies' vice president of POWERVR. "We look
forward to continuing our relationship with Forte to utilize CellMath
tools in future generations of our technologies."
"Digital Media Professionals has used CellMath to produce
high-quality, high-performance 3D and 2D vector graphics processor IP
since 2005," remarks Tatsuo Yamamoto, president and CEO of Digital
Media Professionals (DMP). "As design complexity and
time-to-market pressures grow, we are encouraged by Forte's vision to
integrate the CellMath products and IP into its Cynthesizer SystemC
synthesis product. Together, these products should help IP
providers like DMP accelerate time to market and meet their future
design targets."
"Producing the best possible results in the shortest amount of time is
critical to succeed in these challenging times," notes Raimund Soenning,
manager, Hardware Design, Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe.
"Forte's Cynthesizer was instrumental in the recent success of our
OpenGL ES2.0 graphics processing unit. We expect the inclusion of
the CellMath products to further improve design quality and shorten time to market."
The acquisition expands Forte's IP portfolio adding an array of floating
point, integer and application IP. The CellMath Floating Point IP
library contains a set of highly optimized floating point architectures
that can be configured for the needed bit widths or rounding modes.
Floating point implementations can be configured with IEEE precision or
with reduced precision for graphics or other applications where smaller,
faster implementations are required. Available functions include
adders, multipliers, dividers, square root, dot-product, reciprocal
square root, exponential and logarithm. The library also contains
multi-function parts that can produce any of these floating point
functions using shared resources to reduce the combined area.
Forte's library now contains integer multiply-accumulate (MAC)
functions licensed by several companies, including Xilinx for use in its
Virtex(r) family of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). "Arthimatica's
CellMath IP has been an integral element of the DSP 48 Slice in our
flagship Virtex FPGA platforms for three product generations," says Dave
Tokic, senior director, Partner Ecosystems and Alliances at Xilinx.
"Today's news affirms the strategic value of Arithmatica's patented
technology and IP for today's system-level designers."
Other IP includes read-channel IP, based on patented double-detector
Viterbi decoder technology, for use in increasing capacity in storage
applications.
Forte Design Systems is a leading provider of software products that enable
design at a higher level of abstraction and improve design results. Its
innovative synthesis technologies and intellectual property offerings allow
design teams creating complex electronic chips and systems to reduce their
overall design and verification time. More than half of the top 20
worldwide semiconductor companies use Forte's products in production today
for ASIC, SoC and FPGA design. Forte is headquartered in San Jose, Calif.,
with additional offices in England, Japan, Korea, and the United
States. For more information, visit
www.ForteDS.com.
Forte acknowledges trademarks or registered trademarks of other
organizations for their respective products and services.
For more information, contact:
Brett Cline, Forte Design Systems
(978) 206-1855
brett@ForteDS.com
Nanette Collins, Public Relations for Forte Design Systems
(617)
437-1822
nanette@nvc.com
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