Scottish system EDA start-up signs up STMicro

Scottish system EDA start-up signs up STMicro
EDINBURGH, Scotland --- A start-up company that was spun out of Edinburgh University and previously known as Adaptive Programmable Silicon Ltd. has changed its name to CriticalBlue and is introducing software that it claims can generate optimised application-specific processors from customers' original application code.

The company has also signed up STMicroelectronics as an early adopter of its technology and taken EDA entrepreneur Simon Davidmann on to its board of directors.

Davidmann founded Co-Design Automation Inc. and recently sold it to Synopsys Inc. (see August 28, 2002, story), an experience which may prove valuable to Ben Hounsell the founder and chief executive officer of CriticalBlue.

The Cascade EDA tool analyses application software and automatically generates a co-processor intended to run the tasks more efficiently than a general-purpose microprocessor, CriticalBlue said. The software allows exploration of multiple implementations. The company said it would follow the launch of the generic Cascade tool with domain and function specific enhancements.

Among the advantages claimed for the Cascade tool are that it works from a standard embedded software tool chain; automatically generates a C language model of the co-processor and supports a route through to hardware RTL generation.

Such technology has been been attempted before but mainly in research, with a couple of notable commercial developments: the Handel-C hardware compiler from Celoxica Ltd. can be used to generate FPGA hardware from application software and Target Compiler Technologies NV has for many years helped companies produce application-specific procressors.

It is not clear whether the Cascade tool only produces co-processors to run alongside a general purpose processor, or whether it can also generate stand-alone application-specific processors. Also the company has not commented about whether compilers are required, or whether they are also generated by the Cascade tool suite.

"We have recently tested the technology of CriticalBlue and the initial results look very promising in terms of the performance/cost ratio and the development time we would have expected using traditional methods," commented Luigi Mantellassi, R&D director of the imaging processors division of STMicroelectronics.

When CriticalBlue was called Advanced Programmable Silicon it described itself as being based around advanced "patentable" optimization techniques that used a customer's application software as its starting point along with a number of system performance requirements. The design tools analyzed the software and produced a customized processor optimized for execution of the application code, within the desired performance constraints. "The optimization between hardware and software occurs directly from the customers' software code without the need for what is traditionally a time consuming and costly 'ad-hoc' process," the company said at the time.

As Advanced Progammable Silicon was pitching to venture capitalists the company said that its revenue would be based upon a renewable license model, sold to microelectronics design companies via the EDA and Intellectual Property (IP) markets.

"In the 1990's most major advancements in implementation tools were focused in and around the RTL to GDSII flow. As product differentiation becomes more of a software issue, I believe that efficient implementation options from the embedded software domain are a key challenge for our industry," said board member Davidmann, in a statement issued by CriticalBlue. "The Cascade tool suite is intuitive, innovative, and delivers a solution for rapidly migrating software onto an appropriate hardware platform," he added.

Cascade is being evaluated in an early adopter program by STMicroelectronics and is due to enter beta testing with other companies in the third quarter of 2003, CriticalBlue said. The annual license fee for Cascade is between $35,000 and $200,000, the company said.