( ESNUG 286 Item 1 ) ---------------------------------------------- [4/13/98]
From: clayd@systems.com (Clay Degenhardt)
Subject: Verilog vs. VHDL, NT vs. Unix, and Ron Collett's Bad Advice
Hi John-
Thought I'd pass along some thoughts after reading your article "From
Beirut to Bosnia" posted on techweb.cmp.com as I was searching for
references to Collett International (Ron Collett).
Before coming to Systems Science, I worked for Zycad over 6 years. Ron
was contracted and, as a stipulation, would speak to the company about his
vision of the simulation-environment-of-the-future. Ron assuredly promoted
the demise of Verilog in favor of the upcoming contender, VHDL. On that
advice, Zycad's executives based the future of the company on a hardware
engine (ViP) designed to digest raw VHDL in preparation to capture the VHDL
market which was prophecized to take over by 1996. Because of this huge R&D
investment, Zycad was fatally crippled and by the time they backtracked to
update the successful gate-level simulator (Paradigm XP, Lightspeed), they
had already lost momentum and could no longer invest in the resources
necessary to regain lost ground.
After my first experience hearing Ron's presentation, I was always
very skeptical of his market analysis. In 1996, it hit directly in my
realm when he avoided the VHDL-versus-Verilog topic and began to harp on
the demise of the workstation platform in favor of NT. I have always
been in the Systems/Networking support end of the organization working
in the verification market for over 10 years. Understanding the trends
taking place in the EDA environment is essential to successfully
planning and implementing appropriate computer and networking resources.
In a sense, Ron's interpretation was in the right direction, but with an
overaccelerated time frame. At that time, NT v3.5 was starting to make
inroads into the engineering environment based on cost-performance
benefits. NT v4.0 was a better design (less buggy, better multi-
tasking, better interface) and has made a big push into the EDA world.
I believe Sun saw this trend forming several years ago and put a lot of
investment into the transition from SunOS to Solaris in order to support
high-end 64-bit processing. It's my feeling that Sun provided an
inadequate transition path and quite a few customers made the decision
to go NT rather than convert long-standing and stable SunOS machines to
once-buggy Solaris. Giving NT a further push were the constant OS
changes by HP from the Engineer-friendly Apollo Domain OS through
various HP/UX flavors. Also, the IBM RS6000 AIX OS was a good reason in
it's own right to scare users to the more friendly and increasingly more
powerful NT platform.
Ever since the nimble Sun sparc-based machines killed the dinosaur DEC
machines, they have been the preferred choice in the engineering market.
The pipelined RISC processor, clean Unix OS, along with the well-
established X-windows interface is still the preferred environment for
serious Engineering work (believe me, engineers *HATE* PCs crashing in
the middle of long simulations, which is a common occurrence). But
besides the number-crunching layout/simulation aspects of the Engineer's
work, they are being asked to perform project management, documentation
and presentation duties well-suited to the PC; an expensive proposition
for a workstation. As Engineers become more PC-savvy, they realize the
tremendous amount of inexpensive and powerful application software
available on the PC and desire to make use of it in the workplace. The
result is the current situation we're seeing of the hybrid environment:
A workgroup of users working on NT platforms with one or 2 Sun
workstations acting as servers for "serious work". X-server software
runs very well on the PC now so it can successfully function as a window
into the Unix environment while other PC-based applications are active.
I believe Sun is seeing this trend and the Darwin systems (Ultra 5,
Ultra 10) are a competitive step with affordable pricing and excellent
performance. Despite this, I will probably purchase a few with low-end
display systems which will act as compute servers and engineers will
primarily use PCs as their desktop interface. While Zycad lost the battle
by betting on VHDL, hopefully Sun will be able to steer their ship to avoid
the Intel/Microsoft iceberg that will turn them into the next DEC (hmmm,
wouldn't that be funny if Microsoft eventually bought Sun?)
Anyway keep up the great insights!
- Clay Degenhardt
Systems Science
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