Case Study: Yokogawa Electric Corporation achieves industry’s fastest PLC performance with Synopsys Processor Designer

Yokogawa Achieves Industry’s Fastest Programmable Logic Controller Performance with Processor Designer

Yokogawa Electric Corporation, a leader in measurement and control systems, set out to accelerate its flagship Programmable Logic Controller (PLC), the FA‑M3V, to meet demanding ladder-instruction performance targets. The team faced three core challenges: dramatically increasing ladder instruction processing speed, a lack of in-house C‑compiler experience, and a compressed schedule that made traditional RTL-first development impractical.

Using Synopsys Processor Designer, Yokogawa automatically generated a complete software toolchain (C‑compiler, assembler/linker, debugger) and an instruction-set simulator from a LISA processor description, enabling parallel hardware/software work and early bug discovery. Profiling and LISA-driven architecture exploration produced a VLIW-like custom processor that met the 3.75 ns/instruction goal (5× faster than prior versions), reduced power and gate count, shortened development time, avoided costly re-spins, and supported a successful FA‑M3V product release.

Yokogawa Electric Corporation

Hirofumi Okamoto

Group Leader of the PLC Development Division