( ESNUG 288 Item 10 ) ---------------------------------------------- [5/7/98]
From: [ The Man With "Sensitive" Bosses ]
Subject: Escalade vs. Summit and Mentor Renoir
John,
Please keep me and my company anonymous. They are very sensitive, and
I get myself into trouble too easily, as you know.
I was wondering if anyone else is looking at Escalade's Design Book
as an alternative to Summit and Mentor's Renoir?
We have looked at both Summit and Escalade about a year ago. Escalade
seemed to be easier to use and more intuitive. It had some convenience
features in the state machine editor which Summit did not. We also had
a state diagram in Summit which produced code which would not synthesize.
On the other hand. Summit had better HDL import capability and some of
the experienced VHDL designers preferred the way Summit treated libraries.
Another thing I like about Escalade is their ModuleWare library of
parameterized functions. These are nice for datapath design and are
not restricted to LPM functions. I consider these to be especially
valuable to new HDL designers. It was actually in looking for this
capability that learned of Escalade.
We have one seat of both Summit and Escalade currently and are starting
an assessment of them along with Renoir, looking at their capabilities
against user needs.
Generally, experienced VHDL users are not very receptive to the use of
graphical tools, except perhaps for doing complex state machine design,
claiming that they are more productive with text. However, they will
usually concede that it is a lot easier to share information if it is
graphical than textual. Personally. I am for whatever one feels to be
the most effective. I advocate a mixed approach, with **overall**
productivity (which includes documentation and reuse) being the objective.
I consider HDLs as a means to an end, not an end in themselves. (This
point seems often to be lost on many people.) IMHO the ability to easily
switch between graphics and text or between languages (without having
to become a language expert in each) to achieve the best results is the
goal. The more the tools help me do this, the better.
Please keep me and my company anonymous. They are very sensitive, and
I get myself into trouble too easily, as you know.
- [ The Man With "Sensitive" Bosses ]
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