( ESNUG 370 Item 10 ) ------------------------------------------- [05/17/01]
From: Greg Arena <Greg.Arena@Dialogic.com>
Subject: Does The Synplicity Tech Support Staff Treat You Like Shit, Too?
Hi, John,
I am an ASIC engineer working for a recently-acquired division of Intel.
We've been working on an ASIC design project in which we've been prototyping
our design with a Xilinx FPGA mounted on a custom-built daughterboard. We
have been using Synplify as the front-end tool to translate from Verilog RTL
into technology-specific primitves for place & route by the Xilinx back-end
tools. I wanted to comment on Synplicity's technical support and see if
anybody else has observed this problem since I know we are not the only
company that prototypes some of its ASIC designs in an FPGA first.
Every so often with our design, we have been getting an error reported from
the Xilinx MAP tool that there was a
"failure to merge XXX component with F5MUX"
and
"[the] design will exhibit sub-optimal timing"
This is an irritating problem because it results in a low-performance routed
design and it almost always comes up with this error reported on a component
of the design unrelated to the code that I had recently changed. The only
way to fix it is to try changing more code to see if Synplify produces an
EDIF file without the problem in it.
I contacted Synplicity about this on 11/29/00. They asked for more info
about the design which I provided. No response. I waited one week and
asked the Synplicity support engineer who had taken the call if she had
found anything or needed more information. Still no response. After two
weeks, I submitted an update to the problem on their web site asking if
somebody else coud look at it. As of today, the call is still sitting there
open on their support website after I log in.
I am wondering if anybody else has had these problems with Synplicity's tech
support and/or this specific problem. Xilinx's technical support group was
of no help on this one. This is very unprofessional on Synplicity's part.
I'm new to this industry, and it annoys me when I think that this probably
isn't the last problem that I will have that will go unresolved because a
vendor refuses to help a paying customer with a difficult problem.
- Greg Arena
Dialogic/Intel
|
|
