CynApps president Jacob Jacobsson said that he wanted to redirect CynApps toward verification when he first joined it last year. But to support hierarchical verification, he noted, CynApps needed a lot of software it didn't have. CynApps found that software in Chronology, a company with which it had a joint marketing agreement.

"Merging with Chronology was an obvious step to make our verification strategy real in a hurry," said Jacobsson, who will be president and chief executive officer of the combined company.

Chronology's Quickbench has a user base of around 500, said David Evans, Chronology's president, who will be chairman of the board of Forte. The testbench development product has a proprietary verification language, Rave, that will be retained. But far more people use C/C++, Evans said, and Cynlib will appeal to those designers.

"It gives CynApps a readily available market that wants to buy now, so it's a good merger," said Dataquest Inc. EDA analyst Gary Smith.

The two private companies, each employing around 35 workers, declined to reveal terms of the merger or to state who legally acquired whom. Forte plans to begin operations April 1 — "not intended as an April [fool's] joke," said Jacobsson.

The most interesting CynApps shift, however, may be a rethinking of Cynlib's relationship to SystemC. "We will present our case on how we can converge the two standards," said Jacobsson, who said he wants to start talking to SystemC personnel.

The welcome mat is already out, said Kevin Kranen, co-chairman of the Open SystemC Initiative and director of strategic programs at Synopsys Inc. "We've been inviting [CynApps] into SystemC, and so far they've declined pretty much every opportunity," he said. "My tech guys say it's not rocket science. Cynlib is kind of a subset of SystemC. You could probably drop the remaining pieces of Cynlib on top, and have a very smooth-running engine underneath."