NEWS RELEASE
ASC Releases Behavioral Optimization Technology
Licenses now available for applications of control/data flow graph (CDFG) technology to high-level synthesis, low-power optimization, and other advanced electronic design tools
June 18, 2001, Design Automation Conference, Las Vegas, Nevada — Electronic design automation research and tool development firm Alternative System Concepts, Inc. (ASC) today announced the availability of licenses for a behavioral optimization technology suitable as the foundation for various types of system-level synthesis tools.
Developed and patented by Princeton University, the technology employs integrated control/data flow graphs (CDFGs) to analyze and represent complex systems. ASC’s agreement with Princeton gives the company exclusive rights to use and sublicense this technology. Having applied the technology to its own research and imminent tools, ASC is now making it available to other firms for use in their EDA products.
“Princeton’s CDFG optimization techniques are the only smart way to process the incredible complexity of today’s behavioral-level designs,” said Alex Zamfirescu, ASC’s vice president for engineering. “We’ve proven this technology’s benefits in our own work on low-power optimization and other design synthesis applications, and we think it offers tremendous value to other firms doing similar R&D.”
In licensing the CDFG optimization technology, ASC will provide a complete package of technical documentation and training, as well as software designed to help others implement the techniques in their own tools. Pricing and detailed deliverables will vary, covering the range from those who are already planning to use the technology and need a legal license for it through companies just starting to work on behavioral synthesis and needing additional assistance.
About the CDFG-Based Behavioral Optimization Technology
Mentored by Professor Niraj Jha, researchers at Princeton began developing the CDFG approach in the early 1990’s, and it has been described and cited in numerous published papers and conference proceedings. In essence, the technology provides a new means for identifying and representing the elements of a complex system and their interrelated behavior. Because this approach integrates and considers both the logical control aspects and the data path operation aspects of a system, it is superior to other methods that must consider the control and data flow functions separately.
Applying the CDFG techniques to a complex system produces an effective representation of that system that can be stored and manipulated in computer memory with great efficiency. This data structure then provides the practical basis for a variety of system-level or behavioral optimization techniques. ASC’s upcoming low-power optimization tool, for example, relies on this efficient representation as it repeatedly applies and evaluates various power saving techniques in order to produce a version of the design with the overall lowest energy consumption.
For a complete bibliography on the CDFG approach, please see Professor Jha’s web site at: http://www.ee.princeton.edu/~jha/files/publications.html.
About ASC
Alternative System Concepts Inc. is a privately-owned company that performs funded basic research and advanced product development for electronic design automation. Focusing on the higher levels of design abstraction, the company’s projects include low-power optimization, virtual rad-hard design, XML-based tool integration, testability synthesis, and HDL translation. ASC is located in southern New Hampshire near Boston, and works with distributors around the world.
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