Power-Aware Architectural Synthesis:Commercial Products

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Commercial Products

Although complete and general low-power system synthesis tools are not yet available, a number of supporting tools have been released. As described in Section 17.3, the performance and power consumption of functional units can be automatically determined via logic synthesis and analysis tools such as PrimeTime and PrimePower from Synopsys, Encounter from Cadence, Blast Power and Blast Fusion QT from Magma Design Automation, as well as Synplify from Synplicity.

Behavioral synthesis has reached a level of maturity at which a number of commercial products are available. Cynthesizer from Forte Design Systems synthesizes an RTL description from a SystemC algo- rithm. The Get2Chip synthesis tool, now owned by Cadence, translates Superlog to RTL. A number of synthesis tools target FPGAs. The DSP Synthesis tool from AccelChip starts from MATLAB, CoDeveloper from Impulse Accelerated Technologies starts from C, Mitrion’s virtual processor starts from a C-like language, and BINACHIP’s FREEDOM compiler starts from (digital signal processing) instruction processor executables.

Conclusions

As indicated in Section 17.5, behavioral synthesis is a commercially supported alternative to RTL design. A number of companies offer solutions to portions of the system synthesis problem. Both areas remain open with active research on new application domains, new synthesis algorithms, and new implementation technologies. Power and thermal optimization techniques in behavioral synthesis and system synthesis are necessary to improve performance, battery life, reliability, product size, and cooling costs. During the next 5 years, we can expect behavioral and system synthesis to continue to displace and supplement manual architectural design for high-complexity products that are produced in limited volumes, e.g., application-specific embedded systems. In addition, we can expect continued research on power and thermal aware synthesis and the industrial application of mature techniques.

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