High-Level Synthesis to Design in the New Millennium

Lauro Rizzatti, Get2Chip, Inc.

Tue, May 21 2002, 7:00 pm              High-Level Synthesis to Design in the New Millennium 1


Anyone designing integrated circuits with millions of gates would say that present crop of design tools don’t make it anymore and that they have been caught in a continually shortening, seasonal, high-volume product cycle produced by the radical transformation of electronics into a consumer industry working mainly on communication and computing devices. That set of  circumstances makes it hard or impossible to execute large designs in the allocated time frame, or add engineers to execute bigger chips in less time.

The evolution in usage of a staggeringly large number of gates is leading the user community to demand a new design methodology. The next step in a natural progression that began with the CAD (layout) tools of the 1970s, was followed by the CAE (schematic entry + simulation) era of the 1980s, and evolved into the RTL (synthesis + simulation/formal analysis) age of the 1990s.

Throughout those decades, designers created circuits and systems from a few hundred gates made of discrete parts or functions selected from a catalog to a few thousand gates engraved in gate-arrays, to hundreds of thousands gates etched in ASICs.

Some will remember the false starts in-between: the silicon compilers, mega-cells, bit slices, ECL variations. However, the EDA industry fused compiler and hardware-description language technologies into a revolutionary RTL Synthesis methodology that turned RTL-based designs into gate-level designs that remain the standard today. Almost all semiconductor companies have adopted these methodologies for chip design.

The next logical step is from RTL to high-level design by way of the emerging standard design approach of architectural synthesis, which enables designers to specify input and output requirements and let the tool determine the details as it automatically implements the RTL code.


About the speaker,  Lauro Rizzatti, Get2Chip, Inc.

Lauro Rizzatti has more than 30 years of experience in EDA and ATE, where he has had responsibilities in product marketing, technical marketing and engineering in markets across the United States, Europe, Japan and Pacific Rim.

In 2000, Lauro joined Get2Chip as Product Marketing Director. Before that, Lauro held a senior marketing positions at Synopsys, Mentor Graphics and Teradyne. He also worked at Olivetti and Siemens as system designer. He has published several articles in trade magazines, presented at EDA conferences, and has taught publicly.

Lauro holds a doctorate in Electronic Engineering from the Universita` degli Studi di Trieste, Italy.


Location: Sheraton Hotel, Sunnyvale


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