!!! "It's not a BUG, jcooley@TheWorld.com
/o o\ / it's a FEATURE!" (508) 429-4357
( > )
\ - / INDUSTRY GADFLY: "The More Things Change"
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by John Cooley, EE Times Columnist
Holliston Poor Farm, P.O. Box 6222, Holliston, MA 01746-6222
I can't believe it. It was a 6 weeks before DAC was going to start and
Rajeev Madhavan, the CEO of Magma, sweet talked me into sitting through one
of his damn web seminars. "This is the end of synthesis as you know it,
John," he said. "You've got to see our new stuff! It's your duty as the
ESNUG guy to do this."
So I was stuck sitting through a Magma infomercial. Blah, blah, blah.
Rajeev's people barked at me about BlastCreate, their spiffy new RTL
synthesis tool stuffed inside the Magma toolset.
Howard Landman gave a talk on the predictability of the new Magma RTL to
GDSII flow. Howard had studied two designs by repeatedly running them
through the Magma flow with minor changes in the input constraints. For
example, he ran a 5K cell microprocessor design at 2.1 nsecs, then 2.2
nsecs, then 2.3 nsecs constraints etc.
Howard then plotted the area vs. delay. Yup, the Magma flow produced the
expected "banana curve". Actually, it was more of a fuzzy "hard elbow
curve", but that didn't matter much. The important thing was that when
your Magma input constraints were incrementaly tightened, the area of your
design incrementally grew. That is, the Magma flow wasn't drunk and
unpredictable, but acted pretty much as how a user would want.
I stopped and thought a bit. Then it hit me. Howard had done exactly
these same experiments 5 years ago using Synopsys Design Compiler which he
presented at SNUG'98. Same fuzzy banana curves and everything. After the
web seminar, bored, I told Rajeev this. He replied: "The big difference is
that Magma is doing it now and we've added GDSII. Magma's the next
generation, John." And he said that with a straight face, too. Whatever.
If you want to see both of Howard's presentations, go to the Downloads
section of DeepChip.com and they'll be there waiting for you. The more
things change, the more they stay the same. Yawn.
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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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