Can you describe briefly your main line of business?

Forte Design Systems provides high-level synthesis technology that allows design teams to create high-quality hardware in a fraction of the time required by alternative tools. Our flow not only reduces time-to-RTL but also improves ASIC design verification while significantly reducing the time needed to get through logic synthesis and the back-end.

What is your best selling product and where do you ship it most?

Forte's flagship product is Cynthesizer, a C-based behavioural synthesis product. We mostly ship it to customers that have a need to improve their time-to-market and productivity by eliminating tedious parts of their design process like manual RTL coding or a need to improve their back-end design process through better front-end design. Today, we ship to mostly consumer electronics companies in Japan, Korea, and Europe.

What is your roadmap from there?

Forte continues to focus on raising the design abstraction level and improving productivity. We continue to invest heavily in our core technology adding new features quarterly to drive leading technologies such as behavioural IP libraries which support our core synthesis business. As we look beyond our core business, we see a number of interesting areas such as verification, additional IP, and front-end design that would strengthen our offering.

How do you differentiate from your competitors?

Cynthesizer uniquely combines flexibility and power. It provides designers a path to high-quality, manufacturable silicon for ASICs, SoCs and FPGAs. It easily handles both datapath and control path designs, integrates verification throughout the design process, and gives designers the ability to realise their vision without losing quality. Designers can generate multiple candidate RTL implementations from a single source for various platforms with wide-ranging constraints with confidence.
Cynthesizer uses SystemC as its input language which provides our users with the flexibility to define specific hardware characteristics such as bit accuracy, timing, etc. when necessary. ANSI-C algorithms can be used for a higher level of abstraction. By using SystemC we've tapped into the growing ecosystem of products and technologies built around a standard language. This allows designers using Cynthesizer to work with other leading ESL products for simulation, verification, analysis, etc in a multi-vendor standardised design and verification flow.

Any strategic move planned for the future?

Stay tuned!

What would make your life easier in this business?

The more the ESL ecosystem develops, the easier it will be for users worldwide to adopt an ESL methodology. This is why a standard language is so imperative. Forte has not only standardised on SystemC but we have invested heavily in its success. Michael Meredith, Forte's technical marketing VP, is the current president of the Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI).