( ESNUG 375 Item 2 ) -------------------------------------------- [06/28/01]
Subject: ( ESNUG 374 #6 ) Avanti Has LEF/DEF; They Just Won't Tell You It
> Once I came to my present employer, I couldn't remember the "getClash"
> command. I knew it existed but had lost my notes. So I asked my AE at
> Avanti to help me out. His response was that I had to ask the salesperson
> about anything regarding LEF/DEF. So I asked him, and his most helpful
> response was:
>
> "It's good to hear from you again. Unfortunately, we do not support
> LEF/DEF. We only support Verilog and GDS II. Are you using Apollo?
> Have you evaluated Saturn (our physical optimization)?
>
> Yeah... I've seen Saturn in action. Or is that "inaction"? ...
>
> Apollo used to output DEF based upon the CEL view, not the FRAM view. No
> clue why, but I have seen CEL views that didn't match the FRAM and the DEF
> was, well, pretty useless. This switch changes the behavior so auDefOut
> uses FRAM for coordinate calculations:
>
> auSetDefOutFramBndry #t
>
> It was probably mentioned in ESNUG before, but there it is just the same.
>
> - Leo Butler
> Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.
From: [ Intel Inside ]
John,
Please keep me "anonymous" if you want to use my feedback:
Avanti does have a DEF/LEF (auDefIn/auDefOut) interface but not a complete
one. It should work with most cases (some non-standard parsing gives extra
workaround freedom while the other needs extra scheme code to workaround).
It's not as complete as SNPS's and Cadence's; but still working for us so
far. And, the documentation is poor or missing for this function.
I heard their new DEF/LEF API is out there already; the new one should be
better than the one I use. They did fix some DEF/LEF input bugs for us but
may put more efforts on their new interface that I have not used yet.
I still like to use text-based design files besides any efficient binary
database so that I can always debug and workaround problems. I wish there
were a better and more popular file format for hierarchical & timing-driven
design than today's DEF/LEF.
- [ Intel Inside ]
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