( ESNUG 521 Item 5 ) -------------------------------------------- [03/28/13]
Subject: User dirt on Synopsys/Magma SPICE, BDA, Spectre, Solido, MunEDA
> - With Synopsys annexing Magma FineSim through the recent acquisition,
> Synopsys will monopolize the Custom Digital/IO and Memory/Standard
> Cell Library territories. Synopsys will recapture their estimated $70
> million/year in lost business to Magma, and with Magma's history of
> price cutting and commoditizing now eliminated, the overall market
> size for SPICE tools will increase.
>
> - FineSim customers will start seeing their Synopsys salespeople after
> the close in Q2 2012, who will tell them how their price is going up
> dramatically. I suspect there will be very little discounting
> considered by Synopsys.
>
> - [ A Little Bird ]
> http://www.deepchip.com/items/0496-07.html
From: [ Elf Boy ]
Hi, John,
I know you like hearing from the hands-on users about what SW we use, so
thought I'd update you about what's happening in the SPICE wars.
It's been ~12 months since Synopsys acquired Magma. In my opinion, Aart
bought Magma mostly for the FineSim simulation business. For years,
Rajeev was replacing Synopsys HSPICE/HSIM/CustomSim simulators with his
FineSim in the memory and standard cell markets.
Aart had to buy out Rajeev because it was too embarrassing.
We liked having the choice and the speed. Right around when Magma was
acquired, FineSim was 3x-10x faster than SNPS HSPICE.
AART'S MONOPOLY:
Exactly as [ A Little Bird ] predicted in ESNUG 496 #7, once Synopsys got
their monopoly in memory and standard cell SPICE simulation locked in,
Aart increased pricing by 15%-20%.
Fortunately for us, his monopoly was short-lived. The Cadence sales guys
have been aggressively selling Spectre as an alternative to Synopsys/Magma
simulators in memory and std cell. ("Yay, Lip-Bu!") They also acquired
Altos for memory and cell characterization.
ANALOG AND RF:
For mostly analog/RF design, most designers use the Cadence ADE cockpit.
The bad news for users is I hear Cadence has kicked Berkeley Design out of
the Cadence partnership program so that Cadence can try to lock users into
using only Spectre with the ADE cockpit for analog/RF design. Berkeley has
been taking analog/RF sales from Cadence with their BDA AFS simulator.
Agilent GoldenGate and Synopsys HSPICE/HSIM is also going after the Spectre
analog/RF simulation market, but it's tough for them because Cadence owns
the ADE cockpit.
For variation, analog/RF designers use either Solido with its interactive
designer-in-the-loop approach, or MunEDA with its circuit optimization
approach. ProPlus doesn't do analog/RF. Both Solido and MunEDA are
SPICE simulator agnostic; they run BDA, Synopsys, Mentor, Cadence.
MEMORY AND STD CELL:
For memory and std cell, most designers traditionally don't use a cockpit.
They just fed their netlists directly into the simulator and looked at the
simulation results. But since 28 nm, we've needed a cockpit to avoid
over-margining or taking variation yield hits.
We can't use ADE because its tied to Composer -- we don't do schematic,
and it doesn't do variation. Looked at using the ProPlus NanoExplorer
as a cockpit, but it's limited to using only their NanoSPICE simulator.
We choose to use Solido as our cockpit because it paralallelizes hundreds
of HSPICE/HSIM/FineSim runs plus they do 6-sigma variation analysis (which
is important for memory and std cell.) Also, Solido told us they've made a
new rev that runs Spectre with netlist-only input. Before Solido only ran
with Synopsys and Magma in netlist-only mode. This is big for us because
it makes Spectre a working alternative to the Synopsys/Magma monopoly.
Only briefly looked at MunEDA. Their 6-sigma analysis is simular to
Cadence's worst case distances approach. Didn't think it would scale
as the number of design variables went up.
BDA is actively trying to take on Synopsys HSPICE/HSIM/FineSim in mem and
std cell, but I haven't heard of any wins they've had. As predicted,
Synopsys has a lock here.
As a fallback, Cadence and Berkeley Design are trying to be the second
source SPICE vendor -- and then to replace Synopsys -- exactly how Magma
operated in mem and std cell before it was acquired.
Agilent doesn't do mem nor std cell SPICE. Neither does Mentor.
- [ Elf Boy ]
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