Synplicity’s DSP Synthesis Platform Achieves Significant Growth in 2006

True DSP Synthesis Methodology and Close Vendor Partnerships Drive Adoption; New Wireless IP Now Available

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Synplicity, Inc. (Nasdaq: SYNP), a leading supplier of software for the design and verification of semiconductors, today announced that adoption of its ESL platform, Synplify® DSP synthesis solution, more than doubled (in number of seats sold) during 2006, with particularly strong adoption in the industrial and military/aerospace markets. Synplicity attributes this growth to its unique true DSP synthesis methodology, the continuing development of the Synplify® DSP synthesis optimization engine and availability of additional IP to support functions commonly used in industrial and military/aerospace applications. Also critical to its success in these markets is Synplicity’s close partnerships with leading FPGA vendors such as Actel, Altera and Xilinx.

“Synplicity’s unique approach to DSP synthesis is compelling when you compare its methodology to language-based flows or other tools that generate RTL,” said Chris Ciufo, group editorial director for Military Embedded Systems magazine and DSP-FPGA.com. “ESL is becoming increasingly important in complex system designs. With Synplicity’s approach to ESL synthesis, the company is making it much easier for hardware engineers to incorporate DSP algorithms into their hardware of choice.”

The Synplify DSP solution is in use across multiple market segments including communications, semiconductor, consumer, and military/aerospace - including the top three defense contractors worldwide. The Synplify DSP software addresses the productivity and performance needs of military/aerospace designers by providing a fully automated solution that quickly delivers highly optimized RTL. With the adoption of Synplicity’s true DSP synthesis methodology, defense manufacturers have experienced improved designer productivity and achieved higher performing silicon results.

“The Synplify DSP product helped us dramatically in both area and performance,” said Michael Adamson, principal design engineer, Pentland Systems. “When we first evaluated it against our previous DSP implementation tool, we found that the Synplify DSP software saved 25 percent on area. The performance was even more dramatic, a 75 percent increase. A big reason for these improvements is that the Synplify DSP software gives us the opportunity to optimize the RTL at the compile stage and perform retiming, which is not possible with other products.”

Paul Beard, senior systems engineer at L-3 Communications, SSG-Tinsley, Inc., also stated, “We found the Synplify DSP tool very easy to learn and use, and quickly realized how ideal it is for our purposes. We can design at the straightforward block diagram level in the Simulink environment, run simulations to verify that it’s doing what we want, and generate human-readable code that’s easy to understand and change – even by someone other than the original author. We found the code generated by the Synplify DSP software usually works better than hand-written code, and that if there are any bugs they’re orders of magnitude easier to find and fix.”

Synplicity’s Close Collaboration with FPGA Vendors

Synplicity works closely with its FPGA partners to provide mutual customers with a well-integrated DSP solution. Actel provides direct access to the Synplify DSP software within the Actel Libero® Integrated Design Environment (IDE), based on an OEM arrangement announced in May 2006 by both companies. Altera customers can use Altera’s PLDs combined with the Synplify DSP software to enable mutual customers to achieve optimal results for their FPGA, or FPGA-based prototyping projects. Xilinx has worked with Synplicity to develop an integrated and seamless flow whereby DSP designers can use both the Synplify DSP software and Xilinx System Generator to create optimized DSP designs.

"As the leading supplier of radiation-tolerant FPGAs, Actel understands the stringent design, performance and reliability requirements associated with military and aerospace applications," said Rich Brossart, vice president, product marketing at Actel. “To increase performance and usability for these customers, we’ve added the Synplify DSP AE software to our Libero IDE Platinum toolkit, offering military and aerospace designers a tremendous value. We will continue to work closely with Synplicity to increase tool interoperability and maximize ease of use within the design flow.”

“The Synplify DSP software accelerates the process of implementing DSP algorithms into our Stratix III FPGAs,” said Jim Smith, director of EDA Relations, Altera Corporation. “Synplicity’s true DSP synthesis methodology fully leverages all the features of Stratix III FPGAs that will enable our mutual customers to easily map any IP developed in Synplify DSP software into Stratix III hardware. In addition to delivering the industry’s lowest power consumption of any high-density FPGA, we believe the Stratix III family has the most flexible FPGA architecture for DSPs, and our joint development efforts with Synplicity will be a significant factor driving the adoption of our devices.”

“We share Synplicity’s goal of ensuring the process of embedding DSP functionality into FPGAs is as seamless as possible,” said Tom Feist, embedded and signal processing solutions marketing director at Xilinx. “With the Synplify DSP software’s new integration into Xilinx System Generator for DSP, our mutual DSP customers can take advantage of the combined tool flow providing users of the Synplify DSP software access to the Xilinx hardware co-simulation and co-processing environments, enabling a seamless link to the Xilinx MicroBlaze embedded processor.”

New Wireless IP and Enhancements in the Latest Version of the Synplify DSP Software

The latest release of the Synplify DSP software, v3.2, adds several IP blocks that are fundamental to wireless communications algorithms. These include blocks for building adaptive filtering applications and a Viterbi decoder for error correction. They are well integrated into the Simulink/Synplify DSP library giving users the flexibility and extensibility of features like vector signals and fixed-point datatype propagation. The new IP blocks make design capture faster and much more concise for developers working with WiMAX, 802.11, and other OFDM-based wireless standards. With the Synplify DSP synthesis engine, designs using these blocks can be optimized for speed or area for target devices from Actel, Altera and Xilinx, thus allowing highly portable wireless IP to be developed rapidly with excellent results.

About Synplicity’s True DSP Synthesis Solution

The Synplify DSP software accelerates DSP algorithm implementation using technology-independent modeling and an industry leading true DSP synthesis engine that creates optimal implementations from a single model. DSP hardware engineers can quickly capture and verify complex DSP algorithms, target various FPGA device technologies, and then rapidly explore performance, area and multi-channelized optimizations based on user-specified constraints. This methodology achieves up to 10X productivity over traditional design flows, and also enables full design portability and faster, more comprehensive design-space exploration.

About Synplicity

Synplicity, Inc. (Nasdaq: SYNP) is a leading supplier of innovative software solutions that enable the rapid and effective design of Programmable Logic Devices (FPGAs, PLDs and CPLDs) and are used in a wide range of communications, military/aerospace, consumer, semiconductor, computer, and other electronic systems markets. Synplicity’s tools provide outstanding performance, cost and time-to-market benefits by simplifying, improving and automating key design planning, logic synthesis, physical synthesis and verification functions for FPGA, FPGA-based ASIC prototyping and DSP designers. Synplicity is the number one supplier of FPGA synthesis solutions and has been rated #1 in customer satisfaction by FPGA designers since 2004 through the EE Times’ Annual FPGA EDA Branding Survey. Synplicity products support industry-standard design languages (VHDL and Verilog) and run on popular platforms. The company operates in over 20 facilities worldwide and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For more information visit http://www.synplicity.com.