( DAC 00 Item 6 ) ---------------------------------------------- [ 7/13/00 ]
Subject: Mentor Seamless, Eaglei & COSSAP, ArexSys, Cardtools, Foresight
THE OLD C SCHOOL: With all this hoopla about C-based tools flooding DAC,
everyone seems to have forgotten that Mentor's Seamless and Synopsys Eaglei
have been in this niche for quite some time now. The 1998 Dataquest numbers
give these 2 products a combined revenue of $19.1 million with Mentor taking
61 percent and Synopsys taking 37 percent market share. The estimated 1999
Dataquest numbers are $27.9 million with "closer to a 50/50 split".
"Customers ask for a lot when they're evaluating these 2 tools, but after
the buy decision is made, ask them and they'll say the deciding factor
was libraries. Mentor has a more complete C modeling library compared
to Synopsys, so this means Mentor probably won't support SystemC. If
they did, they'd lose their Seamless C model advantage."
- Gary Smith, Dataquest Analyst
"Mentor Graphics - I attended a suite demo on their Platform-based design
concept. From what I could make out, this is a tool which is early in
the planning stages and will not be available for sometime (there was a
demo of some GUI functions). I couldn't quite get the difference
between this tool and Seamless, so I asked the Product Line Manager this
question. His response, albeit a bit vague, seemed to imply that this
Platform-design tool was envisioned to be a front-end for Seamless and
allow for processor and memory subsystem architecture exploration and
connectivity along with other large IP blocks and components such as
processor peripherals, RTOS, verification environment needs, software
components such as protocol stacks, and even some user-defined blocks.
A graphical representation of the system can be built complete with
memory maps and addressing ranges. This could then be used to drive
Seamless in a co-verification environment."
- an anon engineer
"Cardtools sells software to help you pick microprocessors and RTOS (Real
Time Operating Systems) for your system design.
Arexsys sells a backplane and "architecture generator". You enter your
system function in SDL, VHDL, matlab, C or C++, and it allows you to
simulate them all together and helps you partition it into hardware and
software."
- an anon engineer
"Synopsys Eaglei. Mentor has taken the correct approach by purchasing
Microtech a few years back. Will Synopsys buy Wind River? I don't
think so. Will Eaglei prevail in the marketplace? Not without such an
acquisition. Transmodeling - a cool graphical front end to manage
C/RTL distributed simulations, etc. Cadence/Synopsys or someone needs
to buy them."
- an anon EDA salesman
"Foresight Systems (foresight-systems.com) has a high level tool designed
to be an executable spec. You enter your system function as a
hierarchical block diagram with C code behind the blocks, and initially
it's not even clear which blocks will be hardware and which software.
You do hardware/software partitioning and trade-offs within the tool.
The co-simulate with other simulators, such as Modelsim, Visual C++ and
Matlab."
- an anon engineer
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