Program in Chip Out!

BANGLAORE: Synfora Inc., the Palo Alto based start up company announced the availability of PICO Express for India and AsiaPac countries. This ‘algorithm-to-tapeout’ synthesis technology is the result of Synfora leveraging over 50 engineer years of research and development at HP Labs. With this product, Synfora promises to remove the barrier in migrating software IP into hardware and enable software designers to significantly reduce time to market and cost of development.

With PICO Express software designers can write C algorithms that can be directly synthesized into efficient hardware, and provide a combined hardware / software solution that optimizes cost performance and power for audio, video, imaging, wireless and security applications.

"Increasingly System-on-chip (SoC) designers are demanding an integrated solution of software that runs on a processor, closely coupled with dedicated hardware. As applications in audio, video, imaging, wireless and security require high performance, small area and low power, a mix of dedicated hardware and processor is essential," said Dr Vinod Kathail, Founder & CTO of Synfora. "PICO Express will enable software designers to create silicon smart algorithms so that their customers will be able to choose processor / dedicated hardware tradeoffs to suit their needs."

PICO Express enables engineers to explore the design space by running series of experiments to determine how the algorithm can be implemented in hardware. When the designer finds an optimal implementation, PICO Express outputs the description of that implementation in a standard language such as Verilog. The designer is then able to explore a range of implementation alternatives, perform "what-if" analysis, and get an optimized design in a fraction of the time taken in manually designing the hardware.

According to Simon Napper, CEO of Synfora "About 70% of the cost is attributed to the design and verification, this can be significantly reduced by using PICO Express’ algorithm level entry technique. The product will cater to the growing digital audio, video, wireless, imaging and security market, and India can look at this as a huge opportunity to provide high value solution derived from algorithm and software development," he added.

When asked about competition, Vinod said "at present, we have Future and Forte doing the same kind of stuff, but we will soon be able to overcome them, once our entire range of applications is launched. Our combination of IP and tools is unique, which gives us an edge over our competitors."

Synfora is in talks with many companies in the Silicon Valley some of which are slightly averse to adopting this new technology because of a huge migrating baggage, informed Simon.

The company has three pricing structures in place for their product and plan to sell it through a combination of direct and indirect channels.