Wavesat leverages Synfora’s PICO Extreme for wireless SoC development

MOUNTAIN VIEW, USA: Synfora Inc., the premier provider of algorithmic synthesis tools used to design SoCs and FPGAs, announced that Wavesat, Inc., a leading provider of broadband wireless silicon solutions, used PICO Extreme® to design a key IP block for the next generation 4G wireless chip, with superb quality of results and extremely short design time.

“PICO Extreme was critical to the successful completion of our next-generation product on an extremely tight deadline,” said Raj Singh, CEO of Wavesat.

“Manual RTL design was not an option, as we would have missed our deadline. We operate in a dynamic environment, and fast time-to-market is a key to our success. We are very impressed with PICO’s ability to deliver verified RTL for complex IPs with high quality of results and in a short period of time, allowing us to meet our stringent timelines. We plan to use the PICO platform for future products.”

Wavesat used the PICO Extreme algorithmic synthesis tool to design and verify the Channel Interleaver for the LTE standard. The whole design took less than three weeks, starting from the C specification to the final delivery of verified RTL.

PICO’s unique parallelizing compiler and multi-level hierarchical design capability were key to achieving the high performance in this design. The design was verified at the C level using PICO’s lint simulation and bit-accurate simulation capabilities, which are significantly faster than RTL simulation.

Automatic generation of RTL testbench and test vectors were key to reducing the time taken for RTL verification. The use of standard interfaces in PICO-generated RTL simplified the integration with the rest of the SoC.

“We’re very pleased that Wavesat used PICO Extreme for its new 4G broadband product development,” said Simon Napper, President and CEO of Synfora. “Their positive experience further validates that PICO Extreme provides significant business value in this rapidly moving market by enabling companies to complete their designs on time and on budget.”