( SNUG 02 Item 1 ) --------------------------------------------- [ 5/15/02 ]
Subject: The Bigwig's Big SNUG Speech
STATE OF THE TECHNOLOGY ADDRESS: As usual Aart covered everything from SOCs
to SystemC to NanoSim to TetraMAX to PhysOpt to Formality to 64-bits in his
annual SNUG address.
"Keynote
Dr. Aart de Geus's speech is always good fodder. Here are the
highlights. The market is still depressed (peak to trough it is
down 45%). He sees the semiconductor industry recovering in a year.
Some areas are still strong, namely games, wireless lans & automotive.
SOCs encompass more and more of the value chain, including many risky
handoffs. Synopsys wants to help by moving toward 'monotonically
decreasing uncertainty'. The challenges he sees and Synopsys
initiatives in those areas are:
Timing closure. Iterations between logical and physical design are
costly. Synopsys intends to continue focusing on PhysOpt 'the
fastest growing EDA tool with 500+ tapeouts' while still investing
heavily in their largest product, DC, particularly in the areas of
power, signal integrity and test. The dominance of interconnect delay
in modern processes causes timing closure problems. He sees
floorplanning moving to a Front End tool. Chip Architect is getting
lots of attention as 'Design Planning is the core of methodology'.
Chip Architect will be the corner stone of full chip content hierarchy
design.
Test. They are adding 'delay test' to TetraMAX to catch late
transition problems.
Verification. Three ways to attack the problem of verifying huge
designs:
- Faster Verification: server farms, mixed language simulation
(with Scirocco), Nanosim (fast SPICE sims)
- Smarter Verification: Formality and assertion-driven
verification via Open VERA
- Earlier Verification: moving to higher levels of abstraction
(gates -> RTL -> transactions) with System C and Cocentric
Design Integrity. Physical effects are sneaking up on us. We can
now measure crosstalk with PrimeTime-SI, but how to fix it? The
answer is to prevent it in the first place. Synopsys is working on
additions to PhysOpt to fix crosstalk problems on critical nets.
PrimeTime will also be enhanced to deal with multiple voltages and
data-to-data checks.
Mixed Signal. EPIC NanoSim is being integrated with Scirocco.
IP Reuse. Synopsys professional services has growing expertise.
Dr. de Geus reported that Synopsys has ongoing plans to support all
its tools under Linux and 64-bit OSes. In answering a question it
came out that Clock Tree Compiler (CTC) will support hierarchy via
interface logic models (ILMs).
Finally, he spoke on the Avanti merger saying that Avanti complements
Synopsys. He said their overall goals if the merger goes through are:
- Connect PhysOpt to Apollo/Astro
- Use back-end knowledge to help prevent Design Integrity issues
- Improve system level verification
Aart said that the current plan is to continue with both the Avanti
tools and Route Compiler until they can be naturally merged."
- an anon Agilent engineer
"Aart's keynote speech was less humorous than usual. He must be
feeling the recession, too."
- Oren Rubinstein of Nvidia
"Aart was impressive. His understanding of his business, the industry
and his products is incredible."
- Brent Lawson of Texas Instruments
"Aart always gives an interesting speech. I'd like to meet his writers
some time. They at least sound like they know what they are doing."
- David Bishop of Kodak
"I thought having the tool managers up on stage provided Aart some real
backing."
- Tom Tessier of t2design
"Aart's keynote address was fine however some of us that had been to
a number of previous SNUGs thought it perhaps lacked any exciting
new 'pre-announcements' of tools and / or features to come. The
group of technical leaders he brought up with him on stage to back
him up and keep him honest reminded me of the team of lawyers that
Mr. Burns (a.k.a. The Simpsons) brings with him when facing any
dicey legal situation."
- Jeff Waite of Netergy Microelectronics
"Aart is smart, so he bring his technical team to answer questions
after his keynote speech."
- Hui Fu of Infineon
"The Q&A people from Synopsys really didn't help Aart. They reminded
me of some type of 1960s dating TV show because they where sitting
on stools."
- Frank Wolff of Case Western Reserve University
"A panel of technical heavies from Synopsys backed Aart by for his Q&A
session, a great idea that demonstrated his willingness to answer
questions openly, honestly, and accurately. When asked about the
future of the Synopsys vs. the Avanti routers, he said that both would
be supported until they could be merged into something better."
- Bob Wiegand of NxtWave
"I liked the pointed questions at Aart's speech about Linux support.
Better Linux support would be better for the design community in
general. Even though Aart mentioned the Avanti merger briefly, the
future direction was still unclear with the back end. I guess we'll
have to wait for the lawsuits and such to sort themselves out first."
- an anon engineer
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