( DAC 02 Item 22 ) ---------------------------------------------- [ 9/10/02 ]
Subject: Calibre, Hercules, Venus, Dracula, Diva, Vampire, Bindkey, Matrics
AN OLD BATTLE, NEW FACES: Here's yet again another place where the Avanti
merger with Synopsys has affected a niche that Synopsys originally never
played in. Cadence has been pretty weak in the LVS/DRC business; but
Mentor's Calibre and Avanti's Hercules have been fighting brutally here.
The Avanti replacement for Hercules, called "Venus", appears to be too
green to be a threat to Calibre yet. Don't be fooled, though. Mentor owns
something like 60% of this market, Cadence 25%, and Avanti 15% -- this is
not going to change overnight. Mentor's Caliber will probably continue to
own this market over the next few years.
"We found Calibre to be slow versus Hercules."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"I have not used Avanti Venus or Cadence Assura at all. Maybe that
speaks well for Calibre since I haven't felt the need to look at
the other tools. ;)
The reason I really like Calibre:
- Anything I have ever needed do was easily handled with Calibre
operators. Calibre has a rich set of booleans, geometric, &
connectivity operations.
- It's hierarchical features work GREAT. We could not have put out
our current generation of chips without it. [2M+ gate chipsets]
OK, we could have but we couldn't have done many of our runs
overnight like we did.
- Calibre's multi-threading capabilities gave us greatly improved
run-times. When in a pinch we would grab one of our 8-processor
machines and crank through the run.
- They've added additional features over the years such as an
interactive results viewer, a GDSII viewer/limited editor for
quick changes, and a full suite of OPC tools.
- Calibre runs on Linux! We were able to use Dual-Athlon [excuse
the AMD plug!] systems and get our LVS runs down from 3.5 hours on
a dual-processor Sun box to under an hour on the Linux box. (It
just squeaked under the machine memory limit.)
Things Mentor could improve in Calibre:
- Add a programming language for more complex operations. Mentor
addresses this with an app note explaining a language really isn't
needed & explains how to interative things with Calibre operators.
Strictly speaking they are correct, you can. But a programming
language would make it clearer.
- Rule file debugging can get pretty involved. But I don't think this
is Calibre specific. All the physical verification tools I have
used are pretty much the same in this area.
That's about it. I guess I will also mention that I've found Mentor's
support desk to be the best of any EDA vendor I have ever worked with.
Other vendor's pale in comparison."
- Tom McKeone of AMD
"Avanti Hercules has been the traditional standard in this area (having
replace Cadence Dracula) but Mentor Calibre seems to be coming on
strong. An engineer at the TSMC booth said they officially support
both Hercules and Calibre, but he personally thought Calibre was faster
and more stable. This is obviously very perishable data - in 6 months
it could be the reverse. UMC uses Calibre as well. Mentor also claims
they are standard for Charter, although it's not clear if that means
A standard or THE standard."
- John Weiland of Intrinsix
"Mentor's Calibre has good GUI interface and RVE that talks to Virtuoso
and run time is acceptable."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Hercules was tailored towards CAD engineers rather than Physical Design
engineers. CAD engineers tend to be scripters and software developers,
and physical designers are not. So unless you worked for a company
where you had dedicated people to develop verification methodology, you
would not use Hercules. One key example was when I worked at Neomagic,
was the inability of Hercules to detect shorts.
We had issues at Neomagic for verifying full chip, where some
macros/blocks were incomplete and we needed Hercules to ignore them.
(I think it is called stop list.)
Comparing Hercules to Diva, Dracula: Herc certainly blows both tools
away. Cadence has no competition in this market. Also, Simplex
tools (evaluated 3 years ago) were incredibly hard to build a flow on.
Hercules in contrast has a tighter integration with Avanti tools.
The single biggest obstacle Hercules needs to overcome is for foundries
to buy in and provide signoff runsets on Hercules. If not the startups
and small size companies will always be running Mentor tools.
Calibre is usable out of the box and foundry provides runsets. It is
easy to debug and is our foundry's preferred sign-off tool.
We are a Mentor house. I doubt if we will switch to Hercules."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"We use mostly Hercules tool for the physical verification and tape-out
of our designs. Over the past one and half year we have used Hercules
to tape out significant number of designs of various processes (upto
0.13u) to in-house fabs as well as to external foundry. We did
experience some problem with the command decks we received from the
foundry (especially handling manufacturing related issues) but the
vendor (Avanti) has always provided good support. As far as run-time
is concerned, Hercules seems to be comparable its rivals.
The main issue we faced with Hercules was limited foundry and library
vendor's support. After Synopsys acquired Avanti we are seeing promise
of improvement. But Synopsys needs to really work very closely with
the library vendors and the foundries to maintain or increase it's
marketshare.
Hercules pluses:
- good control statements (using Scheme) in the deck to customize
the deck on the fly for different DRC/LVS needs of the users
- error viewing using the capabilities of Explorer which includes
netlist cross probing, shorts finding and device selection
- procedural device extraction
- macro and 'Include' capability
- distributed processing
Minuses:
- lacks check number and grouping for selective checking
- some layer arithmetic operations need work
- constructs and options are still changing to handle artifacts
due to process changes
We haven't tried out Venus yet but definitely will try it later."
- Anwarul Hasan of IDT
"In my opinion, the Hercules support team does not have an equal among
the other tools/vendors I have been exposed to. More than anyone else,
in working with them I have the feeling that they take my
issues/problems personally as opposed to treating me like "part of
their job".
In terms of tools, I think that their LVS tool is by far the best in
the industry, both in terms of performance and in the presentation of
netlist discrepancies for debugging purposes. From what I have seen
of Calibre and the various Cadence tools, they do not come close.
In DRC, I think that performance-wise, things are fairly comparable
between Hercules and Calibre. However I still think that in terms of
functionality Hercules has an advantage. I think between Calibre and
Hercules, the trade off is slightly more simple rules coding with
Calibre, versus more functionality and flexibility with Hercules.
In all of this, Cadence really is not on the same level, at least not
for either run time or memory utilization. (Cadence performance has
been lagging for some time in this niche. It's been a while since we
have done any functional comparisons, but I would expect Cadence to at
least be on par with Calibre, but probably slightly behind Hercules).
For Hercules bad points, I would say that the one thing that sticks out
in my mind is the QA of the initial releases of Hercules code. We tend
to find them "buggy". In fact we often wait for the first patch
release of a rev of Hercules before even beginning to look at it with
our own internal regression testing.
We are in the process of migrating from Hercules to Venus now. I
expect that process to be completed in the next couple of months. So
far Venus looks to be even better than Hercules, not only adding
multithreading to the existing multiprocessing, but more importantly,
some underlying architecture changes for our shapes-bashing apps.
The Venus performance improvements vary. We have seen cases where
things improved only slightly and other cases where improvements are
pretty substantial."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"30.0 Custom Layout
OEA sells a lot of specialized point tools for layout related stuff.
One example is a tool that helps you analyze and design on-chip
inductors. A new tool for this year is one that does analysis and
design of RF passive components.
Bindkey Technology sells tools that bolt onto the Cadence layout
editor. One tool fixes DRC errors for you (handy and scary at the
same time), another prevents you from making any DRC errors in
the first place. The design rules come from Diva, Calibre, etc.
I don't know how easy or hard it is to translate rules or if there
are problems with some rules being impossible to translate.
Tanner Research sells an inexpensive PC based layout editor, as
well as verification and place and route software.
The Matrics Group distributes the Laytools software, which runs on
Solaris but seems aimed at PC based users. It does schematic capture,
schematic driven layout (new for this year), place and route and
verification.
MyCAD sells PC based tools for analog design and layout."
- John Weiland of Intrinsix
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