SAN JOSE, Calif. — Compilogic Corp., a startup providing a C-to-Verilog translation product, is changing its name to C Level Design and has appointed EDA veteran Dan Skilken as president and chief executive officer. The company is also rolling out a new release of its C2Verilog product that allows more user control.

Compilogic emerged earlier this year with its first release of C2Verilog, a product that takes the C-language models often used for system-level design and compiles them into synthesizable, register-transfer-level Verilog code. The product has been successful in DSP and CPU design, and has won such customers as Hitachi, Fujitsu, Motorola, NASA and Minolta.

Skilken has more than 17 years of EDA and chip industry experience, and previously held marketing posts at Verisity and Summit Design. He was a consultant immediately before joining C Level Design. Skilken said he became "fascinated" with the company and its products after talking to customers.

"There's a broken link between system-level development and hardware implementation," Skilken said.

Skilken said the company's change of name reflects a broader mission to develop EDA tools based on C as an input language. These could include offerings in such areas as testbench generation, analysis or behavioral synthesis. In effect, C2Verilog is a behavioral-synthesis product already, since it takes behavioral C code and provides scheduling and resource allocation-but it doesn't offer all the optimizations of products such as Synopsys' Behavioral Compiler.

Version 2.0 lets users compile code using a behavioral or structural approach. In the former case, full ANSI C is available; in the latter, designers use a more restricted style of C in hopes of improving synthesis results. Style guidelines for the structural approach will be issued soon, Skilken said.

The new version promises to improve synthesis results through loop optimization, which can create more efficient loops using state reduction. It also supports hierarchy during compilation, making it possible to compile blocks small enough for a synthesis tool to handle.

For DSP designers, C2Verilog 2.0 compiles floating-point variables and operations into Verilog as fixed-point variables and operations. Features such as syntax coloring and "help" features aim at ease of use.

C2Verilog 2.0 is available now on Unix and Windows platforms starting at $75,000.