( ESNUG 295 Item 3 ) ----------------------------------------------- [7/8/98]

Subject: ( ESNUG 292 #1 ) Synopsys Should Catch Up On In-Place Optimization

> I thought you might be interested in a new product from Avanti.  Saturn 
> ( formerly Solar & Solar II) is a post-layout synthesis & optimization
> tool from Avanti that eliminates the need for IPO.  Avanti claims that with
> VDSM you need a very tight synthesis/layout loop (duh!) to converge & meet
> timing goals.  The interesting thing is that Avanti has acquired synthesis
> technology and stealthily struck at a Synopsys weakness.  I find it hard to
> believe Avanti's claims, but they claims to support re-sizing gates, pin
> swapping, buffer insertion, and boolean optimization for post-layout
> optimization.  It claims to work on million gate designs in reasonable
> times.  They also claim to accurately output Verilog netlists and Synopsys
> ECO Compiler scripts (whoa!).  (If some or most of this is true, they are
> way ahead of Synopsys.  Maybe if someone kicks Synopsys in the pants the
> way Ambit did, they will finally get their act together with links to
> layout the way they did with 1998.02 for large block top-down synthesis.
> Maybe if you publicize this, it will happen even faster.)
>
>  - [ I Came, I Saw, They Conquered ]


From: [ One Of Those Evil Cadence Marketing Guys ]

Dear John,

It seems like Avant! is playing catch-up game on the In-Place Optimization
front.  Cadence's PB-Opt (Placement Based Optimization) product does
post-layout in-place optimization and is well integrated into our flow.

And BTW, this product has been out there for more than 3 years now...

  - [ One Of Those Evil Cadence Marketing Guys ]