( DVcon 04 Item 8 ) ---------------------------------------------- [ 05/26/04 ]
Subject: Summit Visual Elite, Mentor HDL Designer (Renoir)
PET ROCKS Talk about brutal receptions! Users were going out of their way
to make fun of graphical design entry tools like Summit or Mentor Renoir.
"How about graphical design entry tools like Summit
Visual Elite or Mentor HDL Designer (Renoir)?"
Hate : ############################################################ 83%
Like : ############ 17%
Guess these tools have gone the way of pet rocks, furbies, and hula hoops.
Maybe if they gave them away for free like the built-in code coverage tools
commercial HDL simulators, it might help. But then again...
I absolutely hate Summit Visual tools. A lot of our IP was created with
this. The code is horrible to read. I can do things faster with
vi and grep.
- Maynard Hammond of Scientific Atlanta
Aren't graphical design entry tools for people who don't know how
to code yet?
- Jonathan Craft of McData Corp.
Graphical design entry is something from the past; I thought nobody uses
them since the days of Daisy schematic capture...
- Boaz Ben-Nun of Starcore DSP
No need for graphical design tools.
- Carl Harvey of Cirrus Logic
Graphical entry tools are a waste of time.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Graphical design entry is a waste of time.
- Don Monroe of Enterasys Networks
In my opinion, graphical entry tools should be banned. They create
directory structures that take up gobs of disk space and write
inefficient code. Once you start using one you're sort of locked in to
it; and it's hard for other designers NOT using the tool to access the
graphically-created design.
- Aviva Starkman of Northrop Grumman
Renoir is also a good one joke. It should have an award for the tools,
the most uneffective. I tried to used Renoir and has the same default
as Summit Visual Elite, takes too many assumption on the coding process.
- Remi Francard of STmicroelectronics
Don't use GUI's
- Winston Worrell of Microsoft
Currently use Summit Visual Elite (less expensive) but it's really only
useful to people new to HDL, people looking for document creation for
Block Representation, and/or if you are inheriting a design unfamiliar
to you.
- Charles Martin of BAE Systems
One client company wanted me to use the Summit tool, but I didn't. The
reason they wanted engineers to use it is for documentation purposes;
however, I noted that the documentation stage was never reached, so I
took exception and got it. While I admit that a graphical entry tool is
good for some engineers, as schematics are for a minority now, it is not
for me. I can visualize everything with an HDL. Active-HDL has a
graphical entry tool, but I don't use it.
- Simon Ramirez of Synchronous Design, Inc.
We use Summit Visual Elite and for code coverage Summit's (now Cadence's)
HDLScore. We like both tools. I have always felt that built-in code
coverage, native to the simulator, was always behind the point tools
in features.
- Tom Paulson of QLogic Corp.
I can't get any engineers interested in graphical entry tools. They're
nice from a documentation standpoint, but the designs are so big today
creating a schematic is too messy. We looked at Mentor's tabular entry
but everybody went back to vi claiming they were more productive.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
I think graphics design is not useful except in report.
- Luo Min of Northwestern Polytechnical University, China
We have the HDL Designer graphical entry tools. We are moving away from
using it. Basically just use it as a graphical method of hooking up
language-based modules. The state machine generation tool is pretty
good though and we sometimes still use that.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Mentor HDL Designer sucks. It is slow, has limited capabilities
and Mentor seems to have no intent to upgrade it.
- Bill Dittenhofer of Starkey
We also use HDL Designer as a state editor.
One of the best design entry tool is Emac's Verilog AUTOWIRE mode (I
really mean design entry not editor to calm the vi camp). We do all
the structural design (schematics) automatically with it.
- Karl Kaiser of EcoLogic GmbH
I've never been a big fan of the graphical design entry tools because
they don't seem to be around a few years later when the code needs to
be modified, and the RTL they generate is not especially readable.
- Greg Schmidt of General Dynamics
No interest in graphical design entry tools.
- Mark Curry of Texas Instruments
I'm not a fan of graphical entry tool. They put another layer between
the engineer and the design. We evaluated Summit a few years back.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Graphical: Summit on older projects (reuse is problematic as well as
integration with other components - assertions, coverage, lint)
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
No graphical design.
- Ross Smith of Theseus Research
We don't use any graphical entry tool.
- Laurent Claudel of Wavecom
We have no use for graphical design entry tools, but if Novas Reusner is
enhanced it might be okay for graphical code documentation purposes.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Have not used graphical entry tools, but do draw lots of design
diagrams.
- Michiel Vandenbroek of China Core Technology Ltd.
We're just learning Summit Visual Elite to see what it can do for us ...
as well as Mentor Platform Express.
- George Gorman of LSI Logic
Haven't tried graphical-entry tools.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Graphical design entry is not powerful enough and it would tie us into
a small vendor. We prefer to use a one solution company to get better
discounts on volume deals.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
We use both Renoir and Visual HDL tools.
- Brien Anderson of Siemens Medical
No one is using graphical design entry tools currently. Previous
experience was it may be fast to do design entry and documentation, but
when it comes to crunch time, people fixed source code instead going
back to GUI which lost track. Most machine generated code was not as
readable as manual written source code. Graphic entry limits the size
of design entry to how big area you can view the design. It is very
good tool for state machine design. There are generally two camps to
this topic: pro-GUI are people whom had more schematic design
background or less experience with HDL, anti-GUI are people afraid of
lose code writing expertise or dislike to debug machine generated code.
- Hsing Hsieh of Hitachi
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