EVE, provider of hardware/software co-verification, announced that it is offering synthesis capabilities known as zFAST (ZeBu FAst SynThesis) specifically to handle large designs that reach tens of millions of ASIC-equivalent gates with a bottom-up and top-down approach targeting its ZeBu (for Zero Bugs) emulation systems.
zFAST supports VHDL, Verilog and SystemVerilog, and EVE claims that it typically runs over one order of magnitude faster than best-in-class field programmable gate array (FPGA) synthesis. It maps large designs with a small increase in area compared to equivalent tools. zFAST can be parallelized on several PCs, further accelerating the synthesis process and enabling design teams to complete a large synthesis job in minutes instead of several hours.
zFAST also keeps register transfer level (RTL) signals so that ZeBu can generate VCD/FSDB/VPD waveform files with RTL signal names. zFAST supports module-by-module, as well as top-down synthesis. Further, it includes ZW-FPGA synthesizable library for FPGA components, namely RTL models for the most common Synopsys' DesignWare Library components. It is tightly integrated with zCUI, the ZeBu Compilation User Interface. The use model for zFAST is the same as the use model for commercial FPGA synthesis tools.
zFAST is available now as an add-on feature for ZeBu. It is priced from $50,000 for the first license, and from $15,000 for additional licenses.