TriQuest is an EDA startup that makes high level behavioral and RTL optimization software for the design of high performance ICs. The company's focus is the controller circuits in most every FPGA and ASIC. TriQuest's products result in up to a 30% performance improvement and area reduction and can boost designer productivity ten-fold. TriQuest has been funded through its founders and private investors.

Conventional logic synthesis tools optimize at the gate level. By doing so, these tools miss the opportunity to make functional transformations, circuit restructuring and architectural trade-offs at the RTL level, and under-prioritize path routability, design robustness and verification. These tools tend to be batch oriented as well, resulting in long and tedious design iterations. Yet the engineers using synthesis tools tend to have the most complex designs and highest performance requirements.

TriQuest makes two tools: Controller Architect and Design Analysis. Both tools are aimed at controller intensive designs. Controller Architect uses TriQuest's Knowledge Driver Optimization Technology to enable designers to explore various optimizations interactively at the RTL level. Once optimized, the output is then fed into conventional gate level synthesis tools. Designers can get a plot of timing, area, critical net volume, and power consumption for each optimization, can insert BIST or ECC and can remove unusable gates. It also generates full coverage vectors for a HDL simulation. Numerous other techniques are included for the analysis of RTL designs. The Design Analysis tool gives a comprehensive analysis report on RTL controller designs. Future enhancements will include additional optimization strategies and datapath support.

Synopsis owns approx. 80% of the synthesis market. TriQuest's strategy is to sell its tools as complementary RTL level optimization enhancements to gate-level logic synthesis tools. As designs get more complex and engineers' frustration levels with current synthesis techniques increase, the market for TriQuest's tools will grow rapidly. Tweaking gates eats up too much time.

This is our first EDA profile. As we've said in prior issues, the classic component sell is changing. The chips are becoming the system. If you offer the ASIC or FPGA, the IP (intellectual property cores) and the tools to efficiently design the circuits, only then have you provided your customer with a solution instead of components. Every ASIC or FPGA rep. should consider selling synergistic tools and IP. The company has reps. in Texas, Mass, Japan, Korea and a few in Europe.

Seve Butler - President (formerly Snr. VP of S&M for Quickturn)