( ESNUG 344 Item 11 ) -------------------------------------------- [2/23/00]
From: John Cooley <jcooley@world.std.com>
Subject: Wally Accidentally "Outs" Mentor Into The Physical Synthesis Race
My jaw dropped when I saw this buried on page 10 of the Feb. 14th issue of
EE Times in what was supposed to be a Mentor "Stream View" anouncement:
Mentor president and chief executive Wally Rhines said Tuesday (Feb. 8)
that the company is going to jump into the physical design market
with its own timing-driven placement tool called TeraPlace. Mentor
quietly purchased TeraPlace two years ago from CLK CAD and since then
has been busy making the tool ready for prime time.
TeraPlace, developed by Chung-Kuan Cheng, professor of computer science
and engineering at the University of California at San Diego, was used
as the placement engine of SVR's SonIC 3.0.
Rhines, who tipped the tool direction at last year's Design Automation
and Test Europe conference in Munich, declined to give technical details
of the revamped TeraPlace but said the tool incorporates fast synthesis
technology, embedded SST Velocity static timing analysis integrated with
the CLK CAD placement technology. ...
Rhines said the tool, which is running at beta customer sites, will fit
into the current physical design flow and will run with logic synthesis
and perform timing driven placement, leaving the routing to traditional
P&R tools from Cadence and Avanti.
Wally had accidentally mentioned TeraPlace at the "Stream View" press event
and quick-on-the-uptake Mike Santarini of EE Times caught Wally's error.
(How I know this is when I phoned Wally about TeraPlace, he said: "I can't
tell you any details about it because I wasn't supposed to anounce it then.
My TeraPlace marketing people are sort of mad at me right now.") I later
confirmed this error with TeraPlace marketing guys.
My congrats on catching a great scoop, Mike! Cool.
- John Cooley
the ESNUG guy
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