( SNUG 05 Item 16 ) ---------------------------------------------- [12/20/05]
Subject: Star-RCXT, Simplex Fire&Ice, Mentor xCalibre, Magma Quartz
HIDING THE SHAME -- I already got publically dinged for this. When on the
survey I asked:
"Aart claimed in his keynote that Star-RCXT is now "5X faster"; in
your experience is this real or B.S.? How does Star-RCXT, Cadence
Simplex Fire&Ice, Mentor xCalibre, and Sequence rank in your eyes?"
Synopsys Marketing (rightfully) corrected me with:
"I checked and re-checked Aart's SNUG 2005 keynote and finally found
that "5X faster RC extractor" on page 91 you read. The reference you
found is for the built-in extractor in Astro 2004.6 which is not
Star-RCXT. This extractor in Astro is optimized for implementation
and trades faster speed against accuracy. It's correlated to within
5% of Star-RCXT. The difference is that Star-RCXT is sign-off, which
requires deadly accuracy. John you made a mistake here in this
survey question."
- Michelle Meier of Synopsys in ESNUG 448 #8
Sorry, my bad. I again publically apologize. But to be honest, there was
a bit of a check in this mistake, too. From the results I got:
"Aart claimed in his keynote that Star-RCXT is now "5X faster";
in your experience is this real or B.S.?"
real: ############# 35%
B.S.: ########################## 64%
Which confirms that people are awake in the survey. That is, Star-RCXT is
not 5X faster this year, and people caught that error. (OK, 64% did.)
Anyway... onto the legit part of this question, here is what people reported
as the extractor they were currently using:
Avanti Star-RCXT: ############################ 71%
Simplex Fire&Ice QX: ############ 29%
Mentor xCalibre: ########## 26%
Sequence: ## 5%
Magma Quartz: # 2%
Silvaco: # 2%
Well at least here's some news that Synopsys won't be mad at me for finding.
They now dominate the RC extraction market.
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
Star RC has improved since last 3 years back. It has caught up with
Calibre-XRC and Simplex Qx.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
I was happier with Star-RCXT last year. Now it seems to take
fooooooooor-eee-veeeeer to run. Star-RCXT and Fire&Ice are the
same for me. xCalibre is not there yet...
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
#1 Star-RCXT
#2 Simplex QX
#3 XCalibre
no comment on Sequence
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Star-RCXT is top in term of speed and capacity.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Star-RCXT is 2-3X faster when using 2-3X number of processors.
- John Schritz of Tektronix
Star-RCXT ranks the highest - it is faster than before, close to 3X
from a year ago.
- Sunil Malkani of Broadcom
Star
Sequence
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
We are using Star-RCXT over the other tools since it has been
historically well correlated to silicon.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Cadence Simplex Fire&Ice > Star-RCXT > Mentor xCalibre > Sequence
- Benjamin Chen of Socle Tech.
I can't comment on how Star-RCXT has changed over time, I've just
recently been benchmarking it. I have done a bit of comparison between
Star-RCXT and Simplex Fire&Ice. My observation on numerous blocks was
that it was generally around 1.5x-2x faster than Qx. PT runs with SPEFs
from Star-RCXT generally had slightly more aggressive performance than
Qx (roughly 2%).
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
1. Star-RCXT
2. Mentor xCalibre
3. Simplex Fire&Ice
4. Sequence
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
We like Star-XT.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
xCalibre #1
Fire&Ice
Star-RCXT #3
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
We prefer xCalibre primarly because we're strong supporters of their DRC
and LVS solutions and all three tools mesh well.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
1 Star-RCXT
2 Sequence Columbus
3 Mentor xCalibre
4 Simplex Fire&Ice
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Star and Fire&Ice are about the same. Their speed is not the bottleneck
of our flows, and if it was, we would run it in parallel mode.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Mentor xCalibre is best one.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Star-RCXT and xCalibre rank highly; no experience with the others.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Only use RCXT.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Star has greatly improved. Now may be switching to Fire&Ice.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Star-RCXT is certainly better than Sequence. We recently switched from
our proprietary extraction to Star-RCXT -- so it must have impressed
some very conservative engineers.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
I would say that Star and F&I are similar. Don't use the other.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Our experience has been that Star-RCXT is a pain to use compared to Cadence
or Silvaco. In particular, power nets are treated differently than signal
nets. This causes grief when doing power cuts for isolated I/O power or
cutting power for analog cores (e.g. PLL). Some of this is caused by the
treatment of substrate/well ties in the approved run sets. In all LVS
tools, it is getting more important to treat power/ground as another net.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Star-RCXT has a weird layer stackup description.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Just learning Star-RCXT. There are so many switches I'm sure that with
the minimal set it is quicker. But I'm not so sure that with the features
I want to use it ends up quicker than xCalibre.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Have used HyperExtract in the past, which was really slow. Now using
Star-RCXT which is much faster than Cadence. Don't care much for Mentor
timing tools of any sort. Slow, memory-hungry and tedious to use.
Stopped using them.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
Just compared Star-RCXT to Magma QuartzRC. Both tools from a QOR result
looked very good, would sign off with either. Star is much (2-3x) faster
than Quartz though, offers multithreading (which Quartz doesn't have yet)
and is a proven and trusted tool. Quartz, on the other hand has
integration with our Blast Fusion for timing closure.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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