> 10.) The real fight I see in the much ballyhooed ESL niche boils down to
>      Forte SystemC vs. Mentor ANSI C.  At Forte (booth 1428), they'll be
>      showing their Cynthesizer that now supposedly does "TLM synthesis"
>      which they claim is now TLM ANSI C => SystemC => RTL => gates.  Ask
>      for Brett Cline.  Freebie: weird computer monitor sweepers.  At
>      Mentor (booth 928) their new Catapult SL does pure ANSI C++ => RTL
>      and it supposedly has some sort of new hierarchy "channels" in it.
>      Ask for Shawn McCloud or Anil Khanna.  Freebie: one-armed backpack.
>
>          - from http://www.deepchip.com/gadfly/gad072006.html


From: Simon Calder <simon.calder=user domain=spiratech spot calm>

John,

This may sound like sour grapes for SpiraTech not making your 'Cheesy Must
See List', however I must take issue with your distillation of ESL to merely
a battle between two C behavioral synthesis tools.

Even your nemesis, Gary Smith, suggests that behavioral synthesis will only
ever be a tiny fraction of the total ESL market.

Please come and at least visit us (booth 1814), and we will show you what
methodology the world's major SoC developers are using to design and verify
their 50 M+ transistor devices and associated driver software.  Behavioral
synthesis hardly plays any role, but SystemC TLMs and testbenches do,
System Verilog test benches and assertions do, mixed language, mixed
abstraction simulators such as Questa and Incisive do, emulators and FPGA
prototypes do, transaction-based accelerators like Carbon and Tenison will
along with transaction-based debuggers like Verdi nESL and Siloti.

Gary Smith's numbers will eventually be right and are much more on track
than he is given credit for, even by himself.  In fact if you count all the
mega-FPGAs that are being bought almost exclusively for SoC prototyping,
his $1.6 billion number may already have been achieved!

    - Simon Calder, CEO
      SpiraTech, Ltd.                            Manchester, UK

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From: Vincent Perrier <vincent.perrier=user domain=cofluentdesign spot calm>

Hi John,

We should definitely make it in your Cheesy DAC Must See List.  From what
I remember you're not really an ESL fan, but come by our booth (# 328) and
you may change your mind.

CoFluent Studio is the only ESL modeling & simulation toolset that enables
developers of embedded systems & SoCs to get accurate behavioral, real-time
and performance results before HW and SW components are available.  Because
CoFluent Studio transactional-level modeling (TLM) paradigm is based on the
OCP TL3 level (messages passed between concurrent communicating processes),
there's no need for specific HW models, ISS or embedded software.  Hence,
based on the obtained simulation results, CoFluent Studio users are capable
of making the right decisions for their design in full confidence when it
matters: in their project's first 20%.

    - Vincent Perrier
      CoFluent Design                            Nantes, France