Connectal Rationale

Are you happy with the connection between software development and hardware development on your projects? Do you wish you had more flexible tools for developing test benches, drivers, and applications using your hardware? Do you wish you didn’t need a kernel driver?

Do you wish that you could use a common flow to drive your hardware development, across simulation, timing verification, FPGA implementation, and even the ASIC back end?

Do you wish you could use a better programming language to implement the hardware? Do you miss declared interfaces and structural types?

Do you wish you had better tools for debugging the hardware? For reflecting conditions encountered on the hardware back into the simulation environment where you can drill down into the problem?

These are the kinds of problems we encountered which inspired us to develop the Connectal framework. With Connectal, we are trying to bring the productivity of software engineering practices to hardware development without compromising on the performance of the hardware.

Connectal provides:

• Seamless development environment with test benches and apps written in C/C++

• Streamlined application structure

• Faster builds and greater visibility simulating hardware in bluesim/modelsim/xsim

• Support for capture traces on interfaces and replaying them in test benches