( DAC 02 Item 23 ) ---------------------------------------------- [ 9/10/02 ]
Subject: Fire&Ice QX, Columbus, Nautilus, StarRC-XT, Arcadia, Calibre-XRC
STILL FRAGMENTED: It seems like everyone has an RC extractor to sell you
and there's currently no one clear winner. The Dataquest 2000 market share
numbers in this $56 million niche are:
Avanti ############## 28%
Simplex ###### 12%
Synopsys Arcadia ###### 12%
Celestry/Ultima ###### 12%
Cadence ##### 11%
Mentor ##### 10%
Sequence #### 8%
others ### 7%
I suppose you could add Avanti's 28% market share to Synopsys Arcadia's 12%
market share and claim that Synopsys owns 40% of the RC extractor market,
but my gut tells me there's more going on here and this math would be wrong.
"It seems that the RC extraction is a minor problem in the semiconductor
industry. We're now evaling:
Arcadia (beta version)
Calibre-XRC (beta version)
StarRC-XT
Fire&Ice QX
Nautilus
Columbus
I have to tell you that I'm disappointed with all of them for one
reason or another."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"We are using Star-RCXT, Celestry MDC, Mentor Calibre. They're good
tools."
- Zenji Oka of Ricoh
"Mentor's Calibre-CI is needed by Fire&Ice, Celestry NRC and Arcadia.
From my RC extractor eval:
* xCalibre has an awful performance - don't touch it.
* Calibre-XRC is in beta stage. Mentor improved the performance
(vs. xCalibre) but it is not ready yet.
* Celestry Nautilus-RC:
- If you want extraction in transistor level, it is good enough,
but you have to check it yourself. (I didn't invest too much
time to check it).
-If you want the extraction to stop in gate level, NRC is not
the tool for it yet. They will release soon (or already
released?) a version that supports the gate level flow.
For now there is NO TOOL that can execute the RC extraction flow from
Calibre-LVS to gate level DSPF, without errors."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"34.0 Parasitic Extraction
Cadence bought CadMOS, which has a tool called CeltIC for crosstalk
analysis. It can check for both dynamic (delay) problems and static
(glitch) problems. As with its competitors, this either gets glitch
propagation information from and ELF or OLA version of your library, or
calculates it via SPICE simulations that it kicks off when setting up
for a new library. I assume that when noise propagation is finally
added to Synopsys .lib files it will take that, too. It also produces
an echo model for top level signal integrity analysis.
Magma has broken out part of their tools to sell as a separate tool
called Diamond-SI. It analyzes crosstalk, electromigration, and
voltage drop on signal & power lines. It has its own extraction and
timing analysis engines. They say it allows analysis of inter-
dependent effects like increased crosstalk with voltage drop (lower
supply voltage due to IR drop means greater crosstalk susceptibility
because of less noise margin). They say their extraction is within 3%
to 5% of Quickcap (field solver) but is much faster than Avanti's RCXT.
The salesman said he didn't know how it compared to Mentor's Calibre.
Celestry sells Nautilus RC, an extraction tool. They emphasize that
their library based approach (library created from a field solver)
plus their smart cutting techniques to chop up an interconnect into
library components means that the maximum error you will see on any
net is less than their competitors. They also sell a tool for RC
reduction (taking the huge extracted RC database and making it a
reasonable size without losing much important delay information).
Celestry also sells a very interesting piece of IP - a test structure
for measuring actual capacitance on chip, which they say is accurate
down to 0.01 fF.
Sequence Design's extraction tool now does inductance, including mutual
inductance. They say it can extract 3 million nets/hour. It has links
to Calibre & Dracula for LVS; it doesn't link to Avanti Hercules yet."
- John Weiland of Intrinsix
"We use StarRC-XT for extraction, seems to work fine."
- John Webster of Intel
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