The next growth segment in electronics is intelligent devices for the consumer and business markets. Companies who produce these products will be faced with designing multi-function, high performance, low cost SoCs.

Designers face a daunting challenge in designing these SoCs on budget and on time. SoC design tools have not kept pace with the demand and, as a result, SoC has become increasingly expensive and risky to design.
Synfora was founded in January 2003 with license to 86 patents and source code from the Hewlett-Packard Company for PICO "Algorithm-to-Tapeout" synthesis. Synfora's mission is to commercialize PICO and make it available to designers of complex SoCs.

PICO bridges the SoC design productivity gap by enabling the automatic generation of optimal architectures and synthesizable RTL from ANSI C algorithms. As a result of using PICO, designers will see a significant reduction in the cost and risk of designing a SoC while being able to innovate and differentiate their end product.

PICO technology is able to provide an effective solution because it uniquely combines configurable RTL IP designed for efficient implementation of complex algorithms and architectural exploration and configuration tools that create a Pareto optimal list of implementation architectures within user-defined constraints, as well as synthesizable RTL.
This ground-breaking technology will enable companies who are faced with taking standard algorithms such as MPEG2 and enable them to automatically explore and build optimal implementations that will allow them to produce differentiated products. Companies distinguish their implementations of these algorithms based on cost, performance and desired applications. PICO's value proposition is the ability to take an algorithm and produce multiple designs with different cost/performance characteristics.

Although Synfora is a young company, it benefits from over 50 engineering years of research and development from HP-Labs and can already demonstrate compelling examples of how PICO provides "Algorithm-to-Tapeout" synthesis.

For a copy of our PICO Technology Whitepaper, click here. (1.5MB PDF File)