Cooley's DAC Trip Report: An Early Lead

John Cooley’s much awaited DAC trip report is out. The report is a compilation of hundreds of engineers thoughts, findings and commentaries on what they saw at this year’s conference in San Francisco. In a section of his report dedicated to high-level synthesis, John Cooley awards Cataput C an early lead in this area:

• In the so-called “high level synthesis” space (I put HLS in quotes because that’s really just a fancypants way of saying “C synthesis”) I see two indicators that Mentor Catapult C has the lead so far.  The first indicator is Gary Smith’s numbers. The second indicator is not only that users commented more about Catapult C than its rivals, they also *complained* more about CatapultC.  This, oddly enough, is good news for Mentor because it’s evidence of engineers taking the idea of using CatC *seriously*.

Perhaps another way to look at this is to note that Catapult C got 17 users comments, while all the other HLS combined totaled only 5 user posts. 

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Another indication can also be found in the recent user posts to ESNUG, such as a report on a 5 week eval of CatapultC vs. hand coded RTL by “Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer”. Who wouldn’t also want to shrink area by 29% and reduce project time by 40%?

Cooley’s full report can be read here, and the Gary Smith numbers for ESL are commented here.

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