( ESNUG 376 Item 13 ) ------------------------------------------- [08/29/01]
Subject: ( DAC 01 #31 ) Magma Failed, User Chose FE/Plato/Stabie Instead
> Yea, Synopsys has its new Route66 router, but it's green software that
> needs debugging. SVR used to be pretty big before Avanti came around,
> but SVR has always been poor substitute for Apollo. The only other
> alternative is Plato's NanoRoute. From the customer benchmarks I've
> found, Plato seems to be doing pretty well, but it's just a router and
> NOT a replacement for all the sweet things a complete suite of Avanti
> tools can do. Magma is supposed to have some good P&R stuff, but it's
> still beta code and it's wrapped up in their BlastFusion toolset. And
> so far, nobody's confirmed even one Monterey tape-out -- so they're even
> more buggy than Magma/Route66.
From: Jules <maverIC@austin.rr.com>
John
Congratulations on getting your report out. I know it was a lot of work.
What I've read so far confirms in my mind the decisions I made on backend
tools were good ones. The posting of benchmark of NanoRoute vs. Apollo is
invaluable to the design community and I want to thank you for doing this.
Back in March I put together a First Encounter + Plato + Stabie-Soft flow.
I considered some the others but after many (boring) presentations, I
decided to look closer at FE and Magma. After a very good technical
presentation / demo I did a hands on with FE and was sold to the point that
I didn't ever finish the BM with Magma. They were pissed but I'm sorry
(well not really). They had nothing to offer except a bunch of suits and
a flashy (boring) marketing presentations with the longest VP / PhD slide
show I've ever seen. On the other hand, the First Encounter AE took my
netlist, loaded into FE and did a real time live BM. Plato was even easier.
I e-mailed them. We talked on the phone. I downloaded the code. I routed
my design. This is productive. I've closed a design with the flow and now
I'm working on a spin of it plus a new design from scratch.
- Jules
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