Oasys Design Systems adds VHDL support to RealTime Designer

SANTA CLARA, USA: Oasys Design Systems announced that it has added support for hardware description language VHDL and multi-mode capabilities to its RealTime Designer™, the first design tool for physical register transfer level (RTL) synthesis of 100-million gate designs.

“Project teams use VHDL for the design of some of the most complex communications chips imaginable, which is why support for this language was an imperative,” remarks Paul van Besouw, Oasys’ president and chief executive officer. “We are pleased to deliver well-tested and robust VHDL support and multi-mode synthesis in RealTime Designer.”

RealTime Designer’s multi–mode feature, the ability to synthesize RTL code in multiple modes, offers design teams a way to synthesize their designs to support both functional and test modes. They can specify specific constraints for different modes and ensure that the design will run correctly in all desired modes.

Oasys has created a new EDA product category called Chip Synthesis™, a fundamental shift in how synthesis is applied to the design and implementation of ICs. Its RealTime Designer synthesizes RTL code to placed gates in a single pass and in a fraction of the time traditional synthesis does. A unique RTL placement feature eliminates unending design closure and iterations between synthesis and layout.

RealTime Designer follows a “Place First” methodology that takes RTL code, partitions it into blocks, places the RTL code in the context of a floorplan and implements each block all the way to placement.

Chip-level constraints are automatically propagated across the blocks and the design is optimized for the best possible quality of results. During the optimization phase, RealTime Designer will repartition the design at the RTL and re-implement until the chip-level constraints are met.

In addition to VHDL, RealTime Designer accepts Verilog, along with standard timing and physical libraries, SDC timing constraints and floorplans.

Earlier versions of RealTime Designer are already in use in production flows at leading-edge semiconductor and systems companies worldwide.

RealTime Designer Version 9.3 is shipping now. It is priced from $395,000 for a one-year, time-based license.