Company Overview

Corporate Information

Synplicity, Inc.
465 Fairchild Drive, Suite 115
Mountain View, CA 95043
Tel: 415-961-4962
Fax: 415-961-4974
Email: info@synplicity.com

Information Contact: Alisa Yaffa

Mission

To bring leading edge, easy to use, extremely fast, logic synthesis products to hardware designers.

Company Highlights

Synplicity was incorporated in February 1994 by Ken McElvain and Alisa Yaffa, who serve as CEO and chief technical officer, and president, respectively. They recognized the demand for better PC-based PLD synthesis tools in the fast-growing market of hardware designers using HDLs. Synplicity's goal is to create easy to use synthesis products that produce design netlists with superior device performance and area utilization, and have the fastest run times in the industry. The initial focus of Synplicity is on CPLD and FPGA synthesis tools; to be followed by ASIC synthesis products. Products run on PCs under Windows, Windows 95, Windows NT, and on UNIX workstations. Synplicity is privately funded, and markets and sells its products directly, and through distributor and FPGA vendor channels.

Products

• Synplify is a complete synthesis solution that takes designs written in VHDL or Verilog HDL and compiles, optimizes and maps them into small, high performance netlists for multiple leading CPLD and FPGA devices including Actel, Altera, AT&T, Cypress, QuickLogic and Xilinx. It includes an integrated HDL entry tool with a built-in synthesis checker that locates and highlights user errors for fast design development.
• Synplify-Lite is a single architecture version of Synplify that allows users to try out Synplify targeting the device of their choice. Synplify-Lite is upgradeable to the multi-vendor Synplify.
• Synplify-Lite/QuickLogic was introduced in October 1994. This synthesis product was developed to optimize the QuickLogic pASIC antifuse FPGA. QuickLogic OEMs this product. There are more than 600 seats of Synplify-Lite/QuickLogic.

Management

Ken McElvain, Co-Founder, CEO and Chief Technical Officer

Mr. McElvain was with Mentor Graphics Corporation for ten years before leaving to start Synplicity. He was the principal designer of the AutoLogic synthesis tool, responsible for the optimization and technology mapping capabilities. Mr. McElvain has a total of fifteen years CAE and hardware design experience. Other projects while at Mentor and previously at Hewlett Packard include: HDL synthesis, a static timing verifier, simulators, sequential ATPG, schematic editor, extension languages, and CPU design.

Alisa Yaffa, Co-Founder, President

Ms. Yaffa was at Mentor Graphics Corporation before leaving in 1992 to start her own HDL training and consulting business. While at Mentor, and then as a consultant she instructed over fifteen hundred engineers on VHDL, Verilog, and CAE tools. Ms. Yaffa has nine years experience in the electronics business, including instructing, technical marketing, and software and hardware development for such companies as Mentor Graphics, EDA Systems, Amdahl, and VLSI Technology.

Rick Carlson, Vice President of Worldwide Sales

Mr. Carlson is a founder of EDAC, the EDA industry trade association. He has fifteen years experience in key sales and sales management positions at several EDA companies, including Mentor Graphics, Daisy Systems, EDA Systems and Escalade. Mr. Carlson was also Vice President for Highland Software where he helped establish FLEXlm as the defacto industry standard for software licensing.