( ESNUG 475 Item 4 ) -------------------------------------------- [09/18/08]
Subject: CLK-DA, Incentia, Extreme, Synopsys PrimeTime, Oasys, Synplicity
FIGHT THE POWER!: Going against Synopsys in STA or RTL synthesis is like
trying to take on Microsoft in the OS business. God Bless you if you can
do it! Users need serious competition and viable alternatives here to
break these chokehold monopolies.
"What were the 1 or 2 or 3 INTERESTING specific tools that you
saw at DAC this year? WHY where they interesting to you?
(If any were under NDA say it and I'll keep you anon on them.)"
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CLK-DA, Incentia and Extreme-DA were the most interesting. The reason
for this is that at least at a marketing level they all 3 claim to be
better than where Primetime is and have a 6-12 month roadmap that is
much more aggressive than what Synopsys was saying.
Synopsys is promising me in 12 months what I asked for 2 years ago. The
other 3 are telling me what I will need in 6-12 months, and its in beta
today. Synopsys better hope those 3 all fail, because if even one is
telling the truth, PrimeTime's monopoly is in jeopardy.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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Extreme GoldTime - a real replacement to PrimeTime.
- Dalia Karmon of Zoran
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Lie #1: "Our latest (2008.6) revision is 2X faster"... from Synopsys
during PrimeTime demo. You find out later that 2008.06 is 2X faster
than some 2006.x version of PrimeTime. I'm trying to imagine the
marketing meeting where some AE is asked to go back and run old versions
of Primetime in order to see which one is 2x slower than 2008.6.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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Oasys: synthesized open SPARC T1 from RTL to gates during the booth
presentation! 20X speedup claimed.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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"20x-60x better runtime than DC" by Oasys-DA. If it's true, they have
nothing to worry about as everyone in the industry will switch faster
than you can say "BuildGates Works For Me!"
But I don't think anyone honestly believes these numbers in any way
represent an apples to apples comparison, and it was so far out there
that it actually hurt Oasys credibility more than it helped it. All
they had to do was say 2-5x faster and they would get in the door at
a lot of companies. 20-60x probably closed more doors than it opened.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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2.) The other tool I found really interesting this year is Synplicity's
Certify. I first saw this at DAC 2007, and I liked the concept, but
actually playing with the tool proved that it was pretty difficult to
work with.
This year, though, I found that that they've really made some great
progress in ease-of-use. This is really the only tool that I've seen
out there that makes partitioning big ASIC designs for FPGA feasible.
- Andrew Putnam of the University of Washington
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I did find interesting stuff at the IBM and Synplicity booths.
- James Dixon of Aero Corp.
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