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\ - / INDUSTRY GADFLY: "Cadence DRC Running On Fumes"
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by John Cooley, EE Times Columnist
Holliston Poor Farm, P.O. Box 6222, Holliston, MA 01746-6222
While working on my SNUG'03 survey, I noticed something odd happening in the
DRC market. The user comments were either positive about Avanti Hercules or
positive about Mentor Calibre; but they simply ignored the Cadence Dracula,
Diva, and Assura DRC tools. The few who did write about Cadence gave the
impression Cadence was in trouble here.
"This boils down to Hercules versus Calibre, because Cadence is simply not
a factor in this space any more," explained Terry Lowe of IBM. "Unless you
are working with small blocks the only serious contenders are Hercules and
Calibre."
"Calibre and Hercules are ahead. I think Calibre is still the best," wrote
Philippe Duquennois of Philips. Dracula is history and Assura is still
having problems."
"Calibre is great. Dracula/Diva are dead. Assura hasn't got the foundry
support," wrote another engineer.
"The Cadence products are not really in the game, from a hierarchical design
point of view they really cannot compete in performance on a big SoC," added
Pallab Chatterjee of SiliconMap. "The Assura product is being pushed into
the IP and analog creation space, but the fab support is slow so it's not a
big player."
See http://www.DeepChip.com/items/snug03-20.html for all the user comments.
So I was surprised when I saw Cadence and Mentor tied for first place, at
38 percent each, in the 2001 Dataquest DRC market share numbers. How could
this be when so many users had such a low opinion of the Cadence DRC tools?
"Those Cadence DRC numbers are B.S. because Cadence hasn't had any new DRC
sales in that time. It's all those old 3 year FAM license deals that
Cadence did in '98," replied Gary Smith, Chief EDA Analyst at Dataquest.
"This is just license renewals with their prices raised. In some cases it
was a 3x raise."
So pretty much, Cadence is running on fumes in DRC now.
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John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a
contract ASIC designer, and loves hearing from engineers at
"jcooley@TheWorld.com" or (508) 429-4357.
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