Synfora acquires Esterel Studio, adds control-intensive IP development capabilities

MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: Synfora Inc., the premier provider of algorithmic synthesis tools for integrated circuit and system designers of large, complex processing applications, announced that it has purchased Esterel Studio, a tool suite developed by Esterel EDA Technologies.

Esterel Studio is based on the Esterel synchronous programming language in use for the design of control logic and bus systems by three of the top 10 semiconductor companies in system-on-chip (SoC) designs.

“Esterel Studio is complementary to the PICO algorithmic synthesis platform and was already part of an integrated flow used by several of our customers,” said Synfora CTO Vinod Kathail. “This step is a part of our long-term vision of providing integrated solutions for application accelerators and more control-oriented IP."

Esterel Studio is primarily used to design control-intensive silicon intellectual property (IP) blocks and complex reactive systems such as control circuits, embedded systems, human-machine interface and communication protocols. Companies such as STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, NXP and Intel have used the Esterel programming language for more than 50 production designs.

Esterel Studio supports a complete flow from design to verification and supports textual or graphical design of large state machines with arbitrary embedded data path, animated simulation and debugging. Esterel studio is able to generate either HDL (Verilog, VHDL) code or C/SystemC models from the same source code, which ensures that the models used in virtual platforms for software validation agree with the final hardware design.

Esterel Studio also supports formal verification of the produced results, a critical capability for complex control-oriented designs. In conjunction with the PICO platform, this will provide Synfora customers with an integrated design environment for the development of both control-intensive and algorithmic-intensive blocks.