( SNUG 03 Item 21 ) ---------------------------------------------- [05/14/03]
Subject: Avanti Star-RC, Cadence Fire & Ice, Mentor xCalibre, Sequence
A CROWDED HOUSE: It seems like everyone and their grandmother has an RC
extraction tool to seel these days!
Dataquest FY 2001 RC Extraction Market (in $ Millions)
Synopsys/Avanti ############### $29.1 (38.0%)
Cadence/Simplex ############ $23.0 (30.0%)
Celestry #### $7.5 (9.8%)
Sequence ### $6.9 (9.0%)
Mentor ### $5.7 (7.4%)
Silvaco # $2.0 (2.6%)
OEM International # $1.5 (2.0%)
Optem . $0.9 (1.2%)
In terms of true market share Cadence is actually in the one in the top
position since they just bought Celestry recently.
"The one to watch here is Sequence. They just came out with inductance
based extraction. That's RCL extraction. The L becomes important
once you're beyond 600 Mhz. None of the other big guys have this yet."
- Gary Smith, Chief EDA Analyst at Dataquest
"Layout team uses Avanti Star-RC, with additional filtering added."
- Bob Lawrence of Agere Systems
"We are happy so far with Star-XT. It seems to get full TSMC support."
- John Zhang of Broadcom
"Star is integrated with the Milkyway database. If you are using Astro,
you wouldn't want to use anything else other than Star. We have had
no problems with foundry support."
- Roberto Landrau of Mitre
"StarRC-XT is great. Good speed and accuracy. Fire & Ice QX is faster
than StarRC-XT but has some accuracy problems. We are waiting for the
Fire & Ice QXN version which should solve the problem. The SPEF
created with coupling caps is huge compared to StarRC-XT one. No
reduction seems to be done. This is not an issue for PrimeTime, who
can digest it. Just run time and disk space."
- Philippe Duquennois of Philips
"Session 2 - 1:30 - 2:15 - Parasitic Extraction at 90nm with Star-RCXT
Marketing-like presentation. Praising the tool. How is it possible
that all vendors claim their tools are #1 in the market? Someone must
be lying here..."
- Santiago Fernandez-Gomez of Pixim, Inc.
"Star-RC was adopted by my company. Very accurate, 0.18 TSMC process,
400K gates. Real chip runs 266 MHz, timing analysis shows 220 MHz."
- Tie Li of Applause Technolgy
"In my opinion, Star has a huge advantage in being able to read/write
Milkyway native. I haven't used the others."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"In prefered order:
Fire&Ice -> Fast and good accuracy. Handles all types of inputs in the
same fast way. LEF/DEF/GDS.
Star-RC -> Resonable fast and good accuracy but kind of painful to run,
will be better.
Sequence -> Columbus Gold is slower than death and gives accuracy vs
Turbo that will be truncated (i.e not worth running on
digital blocks with std cells.)
Running Gold is about 50 times slower than Turbo on the same design
with 1% gain in accuracy."
- Bengt-Erik Embretsen of Zarlink Semiconductor
"Star-RC tools have performed well for our digital designs. We have not
tried any of the others recently. We have good fab support for
Star-RC. A great feature of Star-RC is the Milkyway interface allowing
seamless use of Star-RC parasitics with Apollo/Astro. We can generate
the SPF in an hour and a timing report in an additional 20 minutes
from Apollo.
We were not so happy with Star-RC for our Analog designs. Star-RC does
not reduce the RC networks as much as we had hoped for. Synopsys
helped us reduce the number of RCs significantly, but we had to write
our own scripts for further reductions."
- Craig Farnsworth of Cogency Semiconductors
"We have been using Star-RC/XT for a while. It has large error
uncertainty (5fF) which prevent us to use it for cell level LPE.
Speed of Star-RC is never an issue. Foundry support for Star-RC is
mixed. One of our foundries uses Star-RC also. So we don't have
any problem getting support. Another has almost zero support since
they don't use Star-RC."
- Wilson Chan of Qualcomm
"Sequence is good for high accuracy analog type extraction while
Star-RCXT is far away winner of ASIC type extraction."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"I do not have experience on Star-RC, but I use EPIC Arcadia extraction
often. Arcadia is an older extraction tool and it seems like that
Synopsys will phase out this tool. Simplex Fire & Ice performs equally
to Arcadia both at the run time and the result accuracy. I do not see
any advantage of Simplex Fire & Ice over Arcadia.
Both tools have limited support from the TSMC fab. TSMC only provides
technology files for the typical corner. However, people routinely run
slow and fast corners. People need to create their own slow and fast
technology files in both cases."
- Hui-Hwa Chiang of Cirrus
"We use Simplex Fire & Ice. Again, we've evaluated several, and chose
F&I. Gut feeling is that Sequence gets the worst support, as the
smaller EDA presence, but that's just my gut."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Star-RC and Simplex are still leading the pack -- the new big contender
is the Mentor xRC product -- even tho the big fab support is not there
yet -- since it back annotates to Calibre LVS (the signoff standard).
There is no pre or post data munging to get the netlists to be usable
in the simulation environments. They can spin both device level and
gate level flows. I think the Star reliance on the Hercules LVS
netlists for back annotation will soon become a liability. The Simplex
Fire & Ice product should hang in their as the tool to beat as it runs
off the Calibre data also."
- Pallab Chatterjee of SiliconMap
"We have our own in-house IBM extraction tool that has been tied
closely to our process for years, and as a result, we get better
accuracy and functionality than any of the EDA vendor tools available.
However in looking to the outside world for possible replacement, I
think that the Star-RC tools have come the closest to being what we
want. We do actually have used Star-RC as an input to what used to be
Avanti StarSim-XT and StarPower with good results.
In terms of accuracy & performance I'd give an edge to Synopsys/Avanti
over Cadence Simplex Fire & Ice with the others being a distant third."
- Terry Lowe of IBM Microelectronics
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