( DAC 03 Item 42 ) ----------------------------------------------- [ 01/20/04 ]
Subject: Pinebush Hyperplot
THE PLOT THICKENS: In the plotting market, the default Cadence Raptor and
Mentor HotPlot seems to be common just because people get it as part of a
package deal. Outside of lazy defaults, from what I've seen here, Pinebush
Hyperplot easily has the most user mindshare with ACS GDSPLOT only getting
an occassional passing reference.
(To be completely honest, I never knew there was special EDA software for
printing chip plots. I thought the plotter manufacturer just provided it
and it worked. That was until the Shearwater guy said I should add a
plotting question to the DAC survey. Who knew?)
Before using Pinebush's Hyperplot, we plotted directly out of Cadence to
a Versatec plotter (both black and white and color). When the Versatec
plotters started dying, we went looking for another plotter. We went
with an HP and HyperPlot. Why? Because it appeared that it would do
what we needed. So far it has for my group. We have another user group
that claims that it is far inferior to what we used to have (primarily
not enough resolution and too slow). However, since there are no longer
any Versatec plotters alive here, they use the HP.
As far as a review: Hyperplot is easy to use. It interfaces nicely with
Cadence. It produces nice readable plots. Customer support has been
great. It works for us.
- Wayne James of Aeroflex UTMC
I'm on the Cad Apps (support) side and I don't personally use Pinebush
Hyperplot daily. We use it inside Cadence (HyperCDS), though several
foundries break it *sigh*... we then use it outside of Cadence to plot
the HPGL file that is generated instead. This way the interface is
common to the users -- fewer apps and "How to's" for me. :)
We have several other groups (Program Management, Test,...) that use it.
Because you can read in many, if not most, grfx file types (it makes it
so we have fewer apps to support). The preview feature makes most
people happy that they didn't really plot it on the first try (the PM
types love it to look at their charts and then plot them).
As for support from Pinebush answered my question or resolved my issues
in a timely manner (better then most vendors).
If you are into TCL, then you can augment their install base as we have
done.
A down side -- sometimes major to some users -- to Hyperplot is that it
is toooo flexible, and the users just start spinning dials and flipping
buttons just because they can, and they don't use the default setup
which we had setup for them. They then get all hosed up and complain.
There is a lot of flexibility on how you send plots through the system
as well, which can be a double-edge sword.
We are generally content with Hyperplot.
- Bill Woodall of Qualcomm
Hyperplot is the only plotting s/w I've used, so I can't really do a
comparison to it's rivals.
But, I've used Hyperplot for about seven years. We've got a couple of
other hard-core users, and a couple more occasional users. The occasional
users tend to get overwhelmed with all the steps we do to setup up for
the tool, and then with all the form data that is presented, so I usually
plot for them. But the seasoned user has no trouble starting the tool and
navigating the menus to create the plots they need.
The Cadence interface is a nice feature. It automatically converts
Cadence layer maps and display info into Hyperplot color/layermaps.
This saves us from having to struggle with typing out oddly-named layers.
But, sometimes the colors in Hyperplot don't resemble the Cadence
colors we are used to.
The Preview is a very nice feature, also. It displays the raster image
that was created by Hyperplot to screen, before being sent to the plotter.
This saves us from spooling bad plots.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
We have been pretty pleased with Pinebush's Hyperplot. I haven't used
HotPlot in about 7 years. There are two main reasons we like Hyperplot
over Cadence's plotting system. First of all, the colors plotted are
the same as the colors on the screen. The Cadence tool does some color
"guessing" that is not even close to your color settings on the screen.
The second reason is speed. Hyperplot has always been much faster than
Cadence's plotting. Recently, we have had some problems with the
Hyperplot tool, but their support is pretty responsive. If you compare
them to Cadence, they are extremely responsive. One of the fixes they
made to the tool for us was some more efficient processing of
hierarchical data. Since we design DRAMs at Micron, we have huge
designs, but a large portion of the design is a very repetitive memory
array. We were beginning to see plot times exceed 10 hours and so we
sent them a test case. They tweaked their algorithm and brought plot
times back under an hour. We have since found a couple of bugs in the
new algorithm where data is missed, but they are usually fixed within a
couple months. Most of the problems have had some sort of work-around.
Strengths:
- Easy to use
- Colors are WYSIWYG
- Plot times are fast (especially with our arrays now)
Weaknesses:
- They are always playing catch-up with Cadence releases.
- This can be a problem if you are trying to use new Cadence releases.
Overall we are pleased with Hyperplot and the support. It has a lot of
nice features, but we mainly use the basics. The preview option saves
us a lot of paper and the user interface is straight-forward.
- Derek May of Micron Technology
OK, here you go:
* we have been running Hyperplot here for > 5 years
* the tool has been very stable and requires very little maintenance
post installation
* convergence to Linux was a tad painful, but has improved greatly with
latest versions
* support can at times be a bit troublesome due to timezone differences
* integration into Cadence is quite good
* latest version is almost -too- feature heavy. In a smaller environment
it'd be less of an issue
If you want any additional feedback, let me know.
- Michael Roten of Intel
Just so you know, we have not tried Mentor Hotplot or Artwork GDSPLOT,
nor have been successful in getting Cadence Raptor to run. The reason
on the former two was probably because it did not run on IBM AIX
workstations, which we exclusively do our design work on. Most of our
Hyperplot jobs are submitted from the Cadence interface.
- Kelvin Lewis of IBM Watson Research
I use Hyperplot on a regular basis here to create marketing collateral
for LSI Logic's RapidChip products. Previously I used a very old,
internally created, program to create postscript files from GDSII.
However, for this task I needed to create JPG files. I was not getting
quality results from my old program, and it was slow, and there was no
support for it since the person who created it was RIF-ed. Enter
Hyperplot.
After getting the evaluation license, it took me about four hours to
successfully create my quality JPG files. The different options are
well documented. The GUI is good and easily navigated but I wanted to
be able to script and create these files very quickly. The logs and
documentation were good enough to lead me through this process.
I have also created some very sharp looking large plots with this
program. The results are quite impressive.
I have the usual gripes about tools. I want it to be faster. I want it
to be cheaper. But it does want I want, in a reasonable amount of time
(on a reasonably fast workstation), for a price that stays just under
the radar of my finance people (i.e. less than 10k).
- Kevin Sorrentino of LSI Logic
The only other plotting software I can compare Hyperplot to is Raptor
from Cadence. For small jobs, both Raptor & Hyperplot are about the
same. But Raptor couldn't handle large jobs. Hyperplot on the other
hand had no problem. Pinebush is also very good with support for any
problems or questions. They are extremely knowledgeable and respond in
a timely manner.
It took me a couple of tries to get the scale, rotation, etc. setup
using the GUI, but it wasn't too bad. We have HyperCDS limked in with
Cadence Virtuoso, which makes it handy to plot directly from the
database.
- Dianne Womelduff of Xilinx
We have been using Pinebush Technology's HyperPlot for about 4 years.
We use it strictly for plotting from the Cadence Virtuoso layout
environment. It is capable of generating plots from GDS, GIF, HPGL,
JPEG and PostScript files, but we do not have a need for that.
We started out using version 3.2 back in 2000 and have Beta tested and
installed versions 4.0 and 5.0 since that time. The main differences
over the years have been:
1) The move from a proprietary licensing system to a FlexLM based
license
2) GUI improvements
3) The addition of a "plot preview" capability
4) Support for the newer releases of Cadence
This last item (support for new Cadence releases), has been the most
important and most difficult portion. Cadence has changed their Pcell
evaluation code several times; both between major releases and, in 1
case, between ISRs. When we moved to the newer Cadence versions,
HyperPlot broke. We had to go back to (or stay on) the older Cadence
version and wait until Pinebush had support for that release. This
usually didn't take very long (3-4 weeks).
The plot preview capability was previously an add-on license but is now
included in the basic functionality for free.
As far as our installation goes, we have it licensed for a single
rasterizing host. Plots can be submitted from any workstation but all
get rasterized and spooled to the plotter from one machine. The design
gets fully rasterized before it starts plotting. It is then plotted at
the full speed of the plotter. We use a 36" HP Color DesignJet which
plots about 3"/minute for a full-width plot.
The one strange thing about Pinebush's licensing is the whole
intermediate speed vs. full speed license. This affects the execution
speed of the rasterizer code. We opted for the cheaper (and slower)
intermediate speed license because our plot volume is not that high.
The Cadence interface was easy to install and the GUI defaults can be
configured to match your environment.
As for comparisons to other vendors, I have tried using the Cadence
built-in plotting feature. It works fine for schematics and small cell
layouts. We usually send these to a B-sized laser printer anyway. Users
have occasionally made a mistake and done large layout plots through the
Cadence plot tool. These processes usually need to be killed because
they take so long to complete.
I have not tried HotPlot because we are plotting straight from the
Cadence database, not from a GDS file. This eliminates the delay of
generating a GDS file just to plot it.
All in all, our experience with HyperPlot has been very favorable. It
just works.
- John Ellis of Cygnal Integrated Products
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