Mentor Graphics details Toshiba's expanded deployment of Catapult C for complex ASIC designs

WILSONVILLE, USA: Mentor Graphics Corp. announced that Toshiba Information Systems (JAPAN) Corp. has expanded its adoption and deployment of the Catapult C tool for the high-level synthesis (HLS) of next generation ASICs for audio, communication and image processing systems.

Toshiba Information Systems (JAPAN) Corporation has chosen and deployed the Catapult C Synthesis tool because they believe that RTL-based design creation is not productive, and a shift to a methodology based on untimed C++/SystemC is necessary.

This shift, which is facilitated by the Catapult C tool, addresses the need for full-chip synthesis by providing a platform for a multi-language, multi-abstraction approach to high-level synthesis. Toshiba also recognizes that the Catapult C tool gives them the ability to generate more solutions to identify the best hardware architecture with much less time and effort.

“What makes our products stand out in the marketplace is the quality and sophistication of the functionality within,” said Tomoji Takada, General Manager, LSI Solutions Division, Toshiba Information Systems (JAPAN).

“With Catapult C, our engineering teams spend less time working on the implementation details and more time where it matters most, innovating and differentiating our products by creating sophisticated algorithms and tuning the hardware architecture for specific design and technology goals.”

“Our design teams have become quite familiar and comfortable with using the Catapult C tool for design exploration and for creating RTL code from the C-based functional descriptions,” said Akiyoshi Ohguro, Group Leader, LSI Design Center Dpt.1, LSI Solutions Division, Toshiba Information Systems (JAPAN).

“Our last project was fairly complex in nature, but the Catapult C tool made the process of implementing and verifying our functionality very manageable. Starting from high-level C++ code, we were able to explore various implementation options for the 8X8 matrix of eigenvalue decomposition algorithm that is at the heart of our FocusNavi product.

“We were able to improve the overall latency performance by a factor of five while keeping the same frequency (100MHz) and area (50K ASIC gate count). This was possible all because of high-level synthesis.”

In traditional design methods, hardware is modeled in the form of Verilog or VHDL register-transfer level (RTL) descriptions, which hard-codes concurrency and most implementation details. These representations are time consuming to create, verify and debug and the process allows very little time to explore alternatives.

In contrast, a high-level synthesis flow starts from much more abstract representations in C, C++ or SystemC. From there, through user-driven constraints, high-level synthesis tools such as Catapult C automatically add the necessary concurrency and implementation details followed by generation of correct-by-construction RTL code. This results in a much faster path to fully verified hardware implementations.

"Toshiba Information Systems (JAPAN) Corp. continues to be one of the most innovative systems houses in Japan,” said Simon Bloch, VP and GM, Design and Synthesis division at Mentor.

“We are fortunate to work with such an influential company, and to learn time and time again that the Catapult C tool delivers exceptional Quality of Results (QoR) allowing customers like Toshiba to differentiate their products with much less risk and far less time versus traditional hand-coded RTL flows.”