Forte Design's SystemC synthesis success with Fujitsu Microelectronics

SAN JOSE, USA: Forte Design Systems announced today that Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe (FME) of Frankfurt, Germany, used its Cynthesizer SystemC synthesis software to successfully implement a subsystem of FME’s new graphics processor unit.

This follows an earlier announcement by FME’s parent company Fujitsu Microelectronics Ltd on the selection of Cynthesizer for its ASIC reference flow. Fujitsu Microelectronics further confirmed that the register transfer level (RTL) code created by Cynthesizer met its stringent RTL sign-off requirements for users of its foundry services.

FME’s newly introduced MB86298 OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics processing unit offers high-performance 3D-rendering for automotive and industrial applications that use an overlay of computer graphics and video data.

The rendering engine incorporates a programmable unified shader entirely designed and implemented in high-level SystemC using Cynthesizer. The pipeline structure of the shader unit was configurable to use high-level geometry, color and lighting algorithms for full-scene anti-aliased (FSAA) image generation.

“Forte’s Cynthesizer gave us the flexibility to make architectural changes late in the project without having to rip up and redo hand-coded RTL,” says Raimund Soenning, Manager Hardware Development at FME. “As a result, we were able to explore several different architectures and algorithms to find the one that met our challenging performance and area targets.”