[1] The company was founded in 1998 as C2 Design Automation by John Sanguinetti, Andy Goodrich and Randy Allen.

A year later the company changed its name to CynApps and began selling C-based synthesis and RTL translation tools.

Forte began selling Cynthesizer, a SystemC-based HLS tool, which had its first successful tapeout in Japan in 2001.

"High level" in this context means designers can describe the functionality of a complex electronic system as a pure algorithm in SystemC.

The designer can then direct Cynthesizer to produce a unique hardware architecture that implements the system in a specific number of clock cycles.