( SNUG 03 Item 20 ) ---------------------------------------------- [05/14/03]
Subject: Mentor Calibre, Avanti Hercules, Cadence Diva/Dracula/Assura
CADENCE RUNNING ON FUMES: If you read the users comments below, you'll
notice that they're either pro-Hercules or pro-Calibre -- they're simply
ignoring Cadence's Diva/Dracula/Assura tools. And those who do mention
the Cadence DRC tools talk about them like they're an industrial accident.
Knowing this, I did a "huh?" when I saw the Dataquest numbers.
Dataquest FY 2001 DRC Market (in $ Millions)
Mentor Calibre ######################### $49.1 (38%)
Cadence Diva/Dracula/Assura ######################### $49.1 (38%)
Synopsys/Avanti Hercules ############## $28.4 (22%)
others # $2.6 (2%)
I asked Gary how was Cadence tied for 1st place in this market??!!
"Those Cadence DRC numbers are bullshit because Cadence hasn't had
any new DRC sales in that time. It's all those old 3 year FAM
license deals that Cadence did in '98. This is just license renewals
with their prices raised. In some cases it was a 3x raise."
- Gary Smith, Chief EDA Analyst at Dataquest
Technically, Avanti Hercules has the advantage because it's native to the
Avanti Milkyway database. Quick & easy runs there. Mentor Calibre has
the advantage because it's independent of the Avanti flow. Shouldn't a
Design Rule Checking (DRC) come from someone other than your P&R provider?
"This boils down to Hercules versus Calibre, because Cadence is simply
not a factor in this space any more. Unless you are working with small
blocks the only serious contenders are Hercules and Calibre.
In terms of DRC, I think the two are comparable. For performance, each
will have cases where they do better than the other, but overall they
are pretty much in the same ballpark. I think that Calibre can handle
'ugly' hierarchy better 'out of the box' with it's HCELL approach than
Hercules can - i.e. without manual intervention. This can be of
benefit to someone who never considered hierarchical design before, but
for groups like mine that have considered and used hierarchical design
techniques for years, things are back to being equal. In terms of
runset language, I think that Hercules gets the nod for offering more
power, features, and flexibility. I have heard some folks give the
'ease of coding' edge to Calibre, but I think they are pretty even.
For LVS it's no contest. I think that the Hercules LVS tool is far and
away the best tool on the market -- for both performance, features,
flexibility, and debugging output. No one else comes close, especially
in the output files used for debugging. Conceptually, I think the
Hercules compare summary files present the design errors in the best
possible way for a designer, or a tools support person like myself, to
digest what went wrong. Other tools output files look like a software
algorithm 'threw up'.
Because of the LVS, and because I am more of a 'power' user that needs
and wants the features and flexibility that Hercules offers, I give it
the nod."
- Terry Lowe of IBM Microelectronics
"The Cadence products are not really in the game -- from a hierarchical
design point of view -- they really cannot compete in performance on a
big SoC. The Assura product is being pushed into the IP and analog
creation space -- but the fab support is slow so it's not a big player.
Calibre seems to have the edge with the fabs and the IP providers over
Hercules -- so they are holding and growing their position. I think,
the new integration of the mask prep stuff (OPC/PSM/RET) in the Calibre
engine environment will win out over Hercules' advantage of running off
of Milkyway. With the Open Milkyway program, Calibre can build a
bridge to Astro faster than Hercules can build a unified bridge
to Mask prep."
- Pallab Chatterjee of SiliconMap
"Cadence Dracula/Diva/Assura are generally behind. We've evaled Cadence
and Mentor tools, and chose Mentor, and not because of price."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Calibre and Hercules are ahead. I think Calibre is still the best.
Dracula is history and Assura still having problems."
- Philippe Duquennois of Philips
"Calibre is the superior physical verification tool. Assura is very
immature, slow, inflexible, etc. Hercules is yesterday's technology."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Our layout group uses Hercules."
- Bob Lawrence of Agere Systems
"I would say that Hercules, Calibre, and Assura are all about the same."
- Bengt-Erik Embretsen of Zarlink Semiconductor
"We did look at Calibre, and weren't too impressed by it. Runtimes were
slightly better, but Hercules' better coupling to the Milkyway database
meant debug could be much more efficient. The Hercules team also is
doing a better job than before on foundry support. All in all, if I
continue to have an Astro flow, I'd probably stick with Hercules."
- Neel Das of Corrent Corp.
"Our customers determine whether we use Hercules or Calibre as our
sign-off tool. This is largely because their libraries are signed off
by the fab in one or the other. For the same data, we have found that
Calibre is much faster because it runs in memory and Hercules runs
largely on disk. The reporting in Hercules is much nicer. You can
figure out where a problem is much more quickly with Hercules -- so if
things are clean, Calibre is great. If there is a DRC problem,
Hercules is better. They routinely catch different DRC's at corner
cases in the fab rules.
Either one is acceptable. We haven't developed any religious feelings
about either Calibre and Hercules as of yet."
- Margaret Valliant of ReShape, Inc.
"Calibre is great. Dracula/Diva are dead. Assura hasn't got the
foundry support."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Definitely, Calibre is best, then Hercules, then Assura. (There are
few false errors in my case, performance almost same as Hercules.)"
- Tie Li of Applause Technolgy
"Calibre still is a big winner."
- John Zhang of Broadcom
"Calibre is much better than the rest."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Hercules gets the job done and is reasonably fast for us. I will
have to give Synopsys the advantage on this one, since Hercules can
read/write Milkyway directly (no need to stream in/out) and the rest
of our designs are on the Milkyway database."
- Roberto Landrau of Mitre
"I've only used Hercules recently. They've done quite a bit to improve
run times through multi-threading and multi-processing, in addition to
moving the development platform to Linux."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Hercules is still the best, for my money. I've only seen Calibre in
demos, and wasn't impressed. Cadence may as well give up now with
Diva/Assura."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"We used Calibre for a long time and were very pleased with the
configurability and performance of the tool. I haven't used Hercules."
- Milam Paraschou of Micron
"We used Hercules 5 years ago and were happy with DRC and LVS. We use
Calibre now since Hercules was not supported by our foundry at 0.18.
In general we are happy with Calibre DRC and LVS. It would be nice if
Calibre could show you its view of the world graphically so you can
debug interoperability issues."
- Craig Farnsworth of Cogency Semiconductors
"I have never used Avanti Hercules, but Diva/Assura seems to be closing
into Mentor's Calibre. Diva/Assura seems to run slower with smaller
circuits but it should make up some on the larger top level. I am most
familiar with Mentor's Calibre. It seems to be more flexible with
different types of input (netlist vs schematics, GDSII vs Mentor layout
files). Cadence support of other inputs is lacking and they do not
care to support anything else. Calibre's rule language seems more
advanced in that it has more complex statements but that might not make
a difference in the future with available design kits."
- Amanda Reddy of Micron
|
|
