( DAC 03 Item 33 ) ----------------------------------------------- [ 01/20/04 ]
Subject: Cadence Virtuoso, Pulsic, Paragon, Mentor IC Station
THE HOUSE ALWAYS WINS: Cadence Virtuoso pretty much owns the custom layout
market. So what does capitalism have to say about this? Lots of little
start-ups spring up -- and the funny thing is that if any of these start-ups
become "too" successful, Cadence will acquire them. Those vying in this
space are Silicon Canvas, Pulsic, and newbie Paragon.
Having much more time with Virtuoso, I would say that IC Station can do
95% of the things that Virtuoso can do and some things that Virtuoso
cannot do. When I first started using IC Station (3 years ago), it was
pretty buggy. Now it is much better.
Here's my pros and cons of IC Station:
+ Integrated with Calibre.
(Calibre is still Mentor's best product which
beats out anything Cadence has... Vampire, Assura...)
+ Easy to customize hot keys and strokes.
+ Mentor support is second to none.
- If you are using some of Cadence's tools there are no
hooks from IC Station into those Cadence tools.
- Their revision control is a little lacking.
I would say the IC Station is an "up and coming" tool.
- Steven Chin of Stretch, Inc.
I saw a short demo of the ECO features of the Pulsic router (running on
top of Prelude). This was a short sort of spontaneous demo on the
floor. What intrigued me about it is that it was less intrusive
compared to ECO capabilities I have seen in other tools before. It
semi-intelligently determined what needed to be edited to allow for the
change to take place. For example Lyric would 'trim' nets in the
'affected area' vs. removing the entirety of a net just because a
segment occupied the location of what is now a metal blockage. This can
be important in the later phases of a design as you have invested a lot
of time into getting the physical implementation correct (and don't want
to perturb any routing unless absolutely necessary).
- Kyle Landry of AMD
I had a nice Pulsic Lyric demo at DAC, but have never used Lyric. Lyric
has (potentially) a lot of nice features, metal slotting, metal fill for
CMP, resistor matching. I was wondering why Cadence seems so far behind
with their tools.
What I feel is going to be needed is the move to Open Access, with Lyric
able to access the same database. This would make using the tool
transparent and could be a good add-in tool.
They also had a very nice toy, ducky floating in the mouse.
- Steve McKinnis of Texas Instruments
I tried the Pulsic tool at DAC for 1/2 hour. My "personal" impressions:
- A company started for the PCB world that tries to imitate the success
of Cooper & Chyan Technology , but with a higher capacity goal.
- Lyric does only legal routing and placement.
- Push-shove feature as in CCT for placement and routing of small
transistors (cells in Pulsic case) - nice ECO capability here.
- DRC clean results with the interactive DRC checker on.
- Cleanup OPTIMIZATION - criterias can be to reduce vias, reduce wire
length, etc. - a smart feature with user driving priorities.
- Routing diff pair, shielding. It is like CCT + more options
(capability) + higher capacity including option to generate some
simple slots in wide wires.
- Lyric runs fast and is capable of 100k place-able components. No
timing or clock tree synthesis checked due to time constraints.
- Linux based. Open Access in works. Integration with Cadence as
first priority.
- Prices are not cheap. $24k interactive option/year (like a
Virtuoso-CR type version.) No need for it as now this part
in Virtuoso-XL is included. $100k full digital/year for the
high capacity. Each additional option is $30-40k a year. Kind
of adds up as you go up in features.
- Very professional people for the demos. They knew and explained
all the pros and cons versus competition.
Conclusion:
They need a powerful placer and some clock tree synthesis capability or
to be bought by Synopsys or Cadence to replace their routers.
Pulsic has a long way to beat full tool sets like Apollo, Astro or First
Encounter, but it makes them probably wonder what new things they have
to do to improve. No way to compare with Tanner or Paragon. Lyric is a
much more powerful tool in terms of capability and capacity but still
only limited to simple placement and routing. You need an environment
to finish DIGITAL design layout today...
After a PhysOpt placement, Pulsic Lyric could be a good addition...
- Dan Clein of PMC Sierra
My experience with Lyric is limited to a 20 minute review of their
"channel router" at DAC. It pre-routes busses and ties into them...
Good for custom designs. Nothing magical jumped out at me...
- John Barth of IBM Microelectronics
I only visited their booth at DAC and had a half hour demo of Lyric.
Otherwise I do not know anything of the company and the tool. Regarding
the demo, I got a rather good impression of Lyric's capabilities, that
is, whatever impression you get from a sales demo at DAC.
For me as a newcomer to layout editing & automatic routing Lyric looked
rather nice to use in an interactive way. I had an additional look at
the tools from NeoLinear, and could not see much of a difference between
the tools capabilities from this standpoint of view. In case of need
of such a layout tool I would definitely want to look at both
Pulsic and NeoLinear.
- Dr. Martin Frerichs of Infineon Technologies AG
I have tried Paragon's PDT and VERI products. I would say they are, at
the surface, superior in performance to Cadence's Virtuoso, and Diva
verification suite. In particular their VERI product was much faster
than Diva, even though VERI was executing on a slower system!! I would
like to stress that this was just a superficial review of the PDT and
VERI, as we were not able to perform a complete design flow with the
tool set, given time constraints. We did however, with the help of
Paragon, managed to run VERI checks with several of our projects and I
was very impressed with the speed, as mentioned above.
The interface was very intuitive and consistent unlike Cadence, and I do
not remember any crashes during the test.
The Paragon support staff was by far superior to Cadence stupport. The
Paragon people were quick, responsive, and knowledgeable.
Cons:
- I would have said superior to Virtuoso XL, but I do not believe they
had cross-probing capabilities between the layout and schematic.
- There was not a "true" Dracula deck support. Given a Dracula deck,
two of the Paragon AEs had to *tweak* the deck to work with VERI.
- There was no antenna detection support at the time of evaluation,
they did mention that they fixed the problem but we unfortunately had
to reprioritize our projects, and evaluation time was not an option.
NOTE that the eval version I reviewed was about a year ago, so Paragon
probably fixed some or all of the above.
- Sam Tran of Orion Design
I test-drove Paragon about 1.5 years ago. I like the user interface
because it is a carbon copy (almost) of Cadence, the software I am using
every day. I am an RF IC designer.
However, it lacks many important functions that Cadence has -- most
importantly, there is no decent simulator or you have to buy it from a
third party, which makes the price of the whole package much less
attractive.
In EDA, these days, you need a complete solution, from design to layout.
Paragon has good layout software (not quite as good as Cadence though)
but lacks the design part. A schematic entry without a simulator is not
very useful...
This was my conclusion about 1 year ago, and I don't think the software
has evolved that much since last year.
- Alexandre Kral
Our startup IC design company demo'd Paragon's PDT in-house. I spent
a couple of weeks playing with it on and off, and even had a long
real-time session with an applicatons guy to walk me through basic
flow/functionality. From what I remember, the Paragon editor did not
have SDL capability, which was a big hole for us. I don't remember
anything notable about their VERI piece.
In the end, we decided to go Cadence because of their omnipresence with
foundry PDK's. Paragon's back end piece of the kits were in Dracula
and most of the foundries that we deal with are using Diva decks.
I should note that it was a minimal investment in my time, as I had to
get back to my Mentor seat and layout an IC.
- John Geyer of Picor
Automatic layout generation for custom designs (analog and RF) are
continuing to gain momentum, with more start-ups joining the race.
Although relatively new to the North America audience, Paragon apparently
has mature tools and decent customer base in Asia. Laker from Silicon
Canvas has similar position. Coming out of Taiwan, Laker has gained
momentum in TSMC. In addition, its SDL and ability to interact with the
layout process manually are outstanding. Both Paragon and Laker could
pose major competitive pressure for NeoCell, which has couple years lead
time in North America. However, the highly analog design biased features
in NeoCell make it more attractive.
- Weikai Sun of Volterra
Synopsys Avanti Cosmos - If you are a company with an established Cadence
flow for full custom and place & route, Cosmos has not too much to offer.
If you are in the Synopsys/Avanti P&R than Cosmos can be a real shortcut
to the full custom world. They developed schematic driven transistor
generation, a crude router, a PCELL equivalent and very easy integration
with Hercules. Now that Hercules goes transistor level extraction COSMOS
integration can be of even bigger advantage versus a Virtuoso
environment. If you are a startup that needs to create a flow and you
choose Apollo/Astro that COSMOS is definitively the tool of choice.
Paragon - very nice environment with almost all the features from
Virtuoso including physical verification but not all the bells and
whistles. The low price is a big incentive. Look at Paragon as a Low
End Cadence environment. All these conclusions are based on Demos and
discussions with other users.
Silicon Canvas - comes strong in the full custom world. Layout editor
similar with Virtuoso XL. Their Pcells written in TCL almost as powerful
as real Pcells, but we did not see the Schematic Driven Layout. The
price is good and includes an online DRC.
Some cool features: query - polygon - info about area, perimeter, R and C
based on a table from process setup, rule driven - info on DRC errors
generated as you go, easy reshape resistors, capacitors, guarding metal
or active only, instead of schematics reads SPICE - SDL - STICK diagram
that helps with floorplanning before the devices are placed in layout.
Looks good overall but in the next version of Virtuoso IC 5.0, Cadence is
far better in many ways. But Silicon Canvas is cheaper.
Cadence Virtuoso - Virtuoso LE (not XL) 501.33 to be released in
September looks like a big time winner. Cadence listened to users and
includes now in the LE version a built in GUI to develop Pcells - process
dependent form with graphical models for transistors options called
Qcell. Once the user is happy the tool exports the form to C and you get
new Pcells - a great feature we were looking for. VCP integration is
seamless so devices and cells are placed in rows and all the flow is easy
to setup. It is definitively worth to check the new tool. Cadence
opened their database to Sagantec to build the compactor Companion.
Their DAC 2003 demo includes a Q Design (Maple Technologies) integration.
Pulsic - a new high performance router that can imitates CCT performance
in terms of capability, but with the capacity of a full P&R environment.
If you have physical synthesis in the flow, Pulsic may be the router
of choice. Once Pulsic gets a placer and clock tree synthesis, and
optimization, etc., into their environment, it is a strong competitor
to First Encounter or Astro. For today I will say is a strong
competitor to Columbia from Synopsys.
- Dan Clein of PMC-Sierra
Custom Layout
Cadence Virtuoso is probably the dominant force in this market.
Silicon Canvas sells their Laker tool, which they say is faster than
Cadence for opening a design, faster to stream in and out and faster to
generate LEF/DEF. They claim their magic cells are better than Cadence
P-cells because no SKILL code is required; they are generated directly
from the technology file. They claim that one year after introduction
they've captured 90% of the market in Taiwan.
IC Editors sells a polygon pusher that competes with Cadence Virtuoso,
Mentor, etc. They claim much faster viewing of designs because their tool
is smart enough to only show as much detail as the current magnification
will be able to view (no more waiting while the screen is slowly
overwritten hundreds of times). They say they can also stream out and
plot very fast, using their own software for HP plotting.
MicroEDA sells a tool of the same name that is a polygon viewer/editor
that can support either Cadence OpenAccess or Synopsys/Avanti Milkyway
and can translate between the two of them (hard to believe they can have
a translator written so quickly). Their microMask tool can fracture
directly from a database, without the need to generate GDSII first.
Design Workshop Technologies sells polygon pushing software that runs
on Solaris, HPUX, Windows, Linux or MAC. It has DRC, LVS and extraction
(including inductance!), P-cell equivalents, and works on all angles.
Their DRC is their own format. They have a translator from Dracula and
are working on one from Calibre. It is very competitively priced at $30K.
Paragon IC Solutions sells an analog design environment. It can launch
Calibre from the GUI, and can take in a report from Calibre, Diva or
Hercules for analysis. It has LVS and quasi-3D extraction (within 5%-10%
or QuickCAP) that they say is better than Cadence Diva. Their signal
integrity analysis allows you to observe signal degradation on a line.
Their DRCs allow you to select individual lines as well. They are moving
towards schematic-driven layout. As of the DAC they had device placement,
they planned flight lines in 7/03 and full routing by 9/03. They have
V-cells, their equivalent of P-cells.
Analog Master sells an analog design environment with a schematic and
layout editor that does real-time DRCs (correct-by-construction layout)
and component generation (like P-cells). Design rules are in their own
format tech file - hope confirming translation is not an issue.
Silvaco sells a set of integrated tools for design capture, simulation,
layout and DRC/ERC/LVS.
MyCAD sells a Windows based IC layout editor with DRC and LVS. It can do
DRCs on a maximum of about 100K gates. It is for smaller projects and
competes against Tanner tools.
Bindkey Technologies (a subsidiary of Dupont) has two tools for use in
the Cadence layout environment. The first prevents you from making DRC
errors, the second fixes errors for you (handy but scary). Rules come
from Calibre or Assura decks. They are planning to get into the OPC and
phase shifting business.
Stone Pillar sells a tool that creates test chips. The input is GUI
driven, and output is GDSII or Cadence SKILL code.
Cimmetry sells Autovue, a viewer with markup capability where the markups
are stored in a separate file. They do mostly board stuff but now support
GDSII as well, although their GDSII is not optimized yet.
- John Weiland of Intrinsix
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