Catalytic acquires Celoxica's ESL business

First let me tell you what I've heard, and then I'll waffle on about the various thoughts that are popping into my mind.

What I've heard
This acquisition expands Catalytic's existing algorithm development solutions with the addition of Celoxica's C-to-FPGA technology, products and services.

Under the terms of the agreement, a cash consideration of $3 million will be paid to acquire the DK Design Suite, PixelStreams and Agility Compiler software products along with Celoxica's RC Series of FPGA development and prototyping boards.

In addition, 18 people will become Catalytic employees and Catalytic's worldwide presence will expand with new offices in Texas, Japan and England.

Catalytic will continue to support the more than 100 existing customers of the transferred products. It will add Celoxica as a customer and reseller of the DK Design Suite to deliver high-performance computing solutions to the finance, genomic and oil exploration industries.

What I'm thinking
Hmmm, I'm pondering several things here; let me elucidate (don't worry, I'm a professional, it won't hurt at all).

The way this has been positioned (that "Catalytic has acquired Celoxica's ESL business") sort of sounds like Celoxica has other business interests that will continue "as-is". In reality, the DK Design Suite, PixelStreams, and Agility Compiler software products along with the RC Series of FPGA development and prototyping boards is the whole "Celoxica Enchilada". This means that, to all intents and purposes, Celoxica is now a division/subsidiary of Catalytic.

And what's all this "Electronic System Level (ESL)" stuff? I guess this depends on what we mean by ESL. In my mind, ESL refers to increasing the level of abstraction used by hardware design and verification engineers. And that's certainly the way that Celoxica used to position itself.

What they did was to develop a language called Handel-C, which is a superset of standard ANSI C augmented with special constructs that allow you to specify which statements (and blocks of statements) you wish to be executed in parallel; which statements (and blocks of statements) you wish to be executed sequentially; how you wish to perform resource-sharing; and so forth. They also provided the tools to compile these Handel-C representations into their RTL Verilog/VHDL equivalents, which are then handed over to traditional FPGA synthesis and place-and-route technologies.

Initially, all of this was targeted toward traditional hardware design engineers. In this context, I would agree that the technology should be classed as ESL.

More recently, however, Celoxica realized that around 80% (as I recall) of their users weren't hardware design engineers. Instead, they were folks like university professors and students who had interesting algorithms (for such tasks as robotic vision systems, financial calculations, etc) written in C. These folks simply wanted to accelerate their algorithms; they could care less how this was achieved and they had no interest whatsoever in becoming FPGA designers per se.

In this case, I'm not sure that I would continue to refer to the tools as "ESL". I know this is just splitting hairs; after all, we are talking about exactly the same tools that are being used by a different group of folks. In this context, however, I would tend to position things more along the lines of "Behavioral representations and synthesis technologies for high-performance computing (HPC) solutions".

What do you think? Do you agree with me or do you think I'm wandering off into the weeds? Please feel free to let me know at max@techbites.com