!!! "It's not a BUG, jcooley@world.std.com
/o o\ / it's a FEATURE!" (508) 429-4357
( > )
\ - /
_] [_ The Second Annual ESNUG/DAC Awards
"DAC '94 & The Greatful Dead"
The parallels between going to a Greatful Dead concert and attending
the Design Automation Convention (DAC) are so many it's uncanny. They're
both typically four or five day long festivals with a main floor show
and lots of more interesting things happening off the floor. At night,
you can partake in all sorts of fun in the parking lot if you're at the
Dead show; or at an EDA vendor sponsored dinner party if you're at DAC.
Sign that unwritten, unverbalised social contract to not tell anyone what
you're about to see & do and they'll let you into that tent/bus/van for
an extra special "fun" time only hinted at on the Dead concert floor. Sign
that lawyer written, carefully worded Non-Disclosure Agreement contract from
the EDA vendor and they'll let you into their demo suit to see their extra
special upcoming software only hinted at on the DAC showroom floor.
And just like there are sets of songs that get the Dead audience all
rocking and sets that put everyone to sleep; there are DAC panels that
have everyone talking and others that people walk out on. Just like
there are light weight occasional recreationial drug users next to hard
core addicted junkies in the Dead concert; there are occasional PC-based
schematic capture FPGA designers next to hard core UNIX Workstation pumping
Verilog/Synthesis/ATPG 200 Mhz 350K GaAs ASIC designers at DAC. And both
worlds employ "pushers" (salesmen) to provide the controlled substances (or
controlled software) to the users for a hefty cut of the money.
Both subcultures wear special attire (tie-dye or suits), trade bootleg
material (concert tapes or EDA benchmarks) and converse in special words
that have meaning only to members of that particular subculture ( "electric
cool aid", "ghanga", "tripping" vs. "ESDA", "PLI" & "regressions.") Just
as there are unique personalities known in the Dead world ( Timothy Leary,
Bill Graham, Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, Hunter S. Thompson)
there are also unique personalities known in the DAC world ( Aart De Geus,
Ron Collett, Bill Fuchs, Richard Goering, John Sanguinetti, Joe Costello...)
But enough cultural anthropology! On with the awards!
WORST OVERALL SURPRIZE AT DAC: An awful lot of attendees at DAC were caught
off guard when they closed the DAC exhibit hall a day early. Yes, it was
technically buried in the schedule -- but who reads schedules until the day
of the event? (As a consequence, on Thursday, I found myself in a 2 1/2 hour
lunch/interrogation about industry trends with Ron Collett, a market
researcher.) Also, DACnet had technical problems the first day that made it
very difficult to login and use. This meant many people were hard to contact
because they blew off retrying the then healthy DACnet on subsequent days.
(A good DACnet note: they added telnet & ftp capabilty this year - great!)
MOST ANXIOUS EDA VENDOR(S): Virtually all of the non-Cadence & non-ViewLogic
affiliated Verilog vendors were acting like debutants at their first ball.
Because Synopsys tipped its hand in the Verilog/VHDL wars in its failed bid
for Chronologics and because Mentor is openly stating it needs a Verilog
solution, the remaining independent Verilog vendors are terrified at the
prospect of not being asked to dance.
WHAT EDA USERS THOUGH WAS HOT: Because sub-micron & low power design seems
to be of interest to quite a few people these days, one of the hottest
talked about companies at DAC this year was EPIC Design Technology. Their
PathMill is an advanced static analysis tool, PowerMill is the leading
dynamic power analysis tool and TimeMill is the a SPICE-like accelerated
analysis tool -- all for submicron design.
The second hot topic was Chrysalis' Design INSIGHT and Design VERIFYer, two
of the very first commercial tools to take the formal verification approach
to checking if one's design has flaws. Because they take a mathematical
approach, they claim that formal verification beats dynamic simulations by
orders of magnitude in overnight regressions.
The third topic people were discussing was Synopsys' Behavioral Compiler,
a tool can take algorithmically written Verilog or VHDL and convert it
to gates. Unlike regular synthesis that pretty much translates from the
original structure in the source HDL; Behavioral Compiler literally juggles
things like registers, MUXes and Adders around to best fit the designer's
scheduling goals.
The Redwood/Comdisco demo and the recent purchase of Redwood by Cadence were
on people's minds. (The big question is how many original Redwood R & D
engineers going to stick around?) Cadence's Verilog & VHDL co-simulation
products were also hot. (Mix & match Verilog/VHDL source/libraries at will!)
ArcSys is targeting Cadence in the place & route business and Integrated
Silicon Systems (ISS) also seems to be attacking Cadence on the mask
verification front (Dracula.) Everyone goes after the big company.
BEST DAC PANEL: Tie between the EE Times/DEC/ViewLogic sponsored DAC
Forum and the DAC sponsored Four CEO panel. What people liked about
the DAC Forum was the fact that they could "vote" electronically for
what a particular panelist was saying at the moment -- making it very
audence interactive in a grand way. (No vendors, only users were given
the hand held voting machines.) What they liked about the Four CEO Panel
was a rare access to how these industry bigwigs saw the world.
WORST DAC PANEL: The EE Times Benchmarking Summit. Lots of people on
the panel and in the audence came prepared to discuss issues like the Actel
Proposal, how PREP works, benchmarking clauses in NDA contracts and
benchmarkers who blackmail EDA vendors. Instead, the moderator (a non-EDA
knowlegable person) had everyone spend 2 hours partaking in a UN conflict
resolution exersize where we had to argue the opposing side's point of view.
(Someone would say something and the moderator would then have everyone
determine "What should I write in the 'ASSUMPTION' column and in the 'WANTS'
column on that statement?") Every time an interesting exchange started,
the moderator would actively step in and stop it. As a result, all we could
do was lightly touch some of the politics of benchmarking.
BEST AFTER HOURS PARTY: Quickturn Emulation's Tuesday Night Bash. They had
a sit down dinner after which the Temptations gave a performance. Although
it had appeared that ViewLogic was going to win this with their ferry ride
to a sit down dinner on Harbor Island and comedian (everyone was smoozing
like crazy to get tickets before this event), the comedian turned out to
be a flop in many a person's opinion. (He was more caustic than funny;
meaning that attendees were stuck doing nervous laughter to be polite.)
It was rumored that LSI gave 100 of its "most favored customers" a sailing
regatta in San Diego bay with six people per sailboat which sounded fun but
was too limited a party to qualify for an award.
BEST USE OF DAC TERRAIN FOR A PARTY: Synopsys' Wild Night At The Zoo. The
moment one got off the bus you had a table full of beers with helpers saying
"Take two! The tour's 45 minutes!" As they shooed you onto the double
decker open air tour bus to go around the zoo. (Harvey Jones even commented
how excited I was -- he was two seats behind me -- when we saw the sheep
exhibits.) Stumbling off the bus, we got more beer and great pre-dinner
munchies in a party with six different animals we could touch & pet. Then
we had a classy swordfish or chicken dinner in an open air Gilligan's Island
setting. Afterwards, all 300 of us were given Irish coffee as we walked to
the firedrummer's performance. (In contrast, Collett reports that Cadence
also had a dinner at the San Diego Zoo for about 65 people with no tour and
three petting animals brought in after dinner. Mentor did something of
similar ilk & size at the San Diego Aquarium.)
BEST RARE DAC FREEBIE: Summit Design's Denim Jackets. They were well made
with a small tasteful "Summit" patch on the left shoulder. Total number
given away: 175 (120 went to their Pacific Rim distributor, 25 on the
showroom floor and 30 for smoozing American gringos.)
BEST COMMON DAC FREEBIE: The Official DAC Gym Bag. It's sturdy, useful and
has a tasteful royal purple, teal & black color scheme. (One user openly
wondered if IBM was "in" on the bag's color scheme because all the IBM
shirts matched it *exactly*.) Runner Up: a tie between the ViewLogic Soccer
Ball and the EPIC Design Technology sports radio. (ViewLogic conscientiously
chooses a high quality freebie that's a pain to carry back on the plane so
everyone can see you carrying it in the airport. They did it last year with
the baseball bat and this year with the soccer ball. I can't award them
Best Freebie when their message is "We're awkward to work with!") The EPIC
Design Technology sports radio's great (batteries included!) but *nowhere*
near the quality of a Sony.
MOST UNEXPECTED DAC FREEBIE: Quad Design's Hammers. (Racal-Redac and Analogy
gave out tape measures, too! Are their marketing managers a little confused
about hardware design industry?) Runner Up: Aptyx's Coconuts. Huh?
MOST CONTENT FREE VENDOR PRESENTATION: Synopsys' Talk On Sub-micron Design.
I'm told it was 40 minutes where only two things were said: design's is
headed towards the sub-micron level and there's going to be more transistors
on chips in the future. A close second was Cadence's re-engineering talk
where they spent 20 minutes vaguely discussing customer successes and that
"Cadence was here to help with your re-engineering needs."
BIGGEST VENDOR LIE: Quite a few people told me about going through the
ViewLogic Soccer Ball Quest they had to sit through a "VHDL is better than
Verilog" talk by a ViewLogic salesman. The salesman confidently said that
"VITAL is just around the corner! VHDL handles concurrent processes better!"
This surprized the experienced simulation users because they've always
described Verilog as "just like C but with wires, registers and constructs
to handle concurrent processes" plus it took five years to get fully debugged
Verilog libraries from ASIC vendors -- why should VITAL be different? Ready
for a discussion on these topics, they asked the salesman to explain his
reasoning. The salesman replied: "Well... That's what I've been told..."
WHAT DO YOU MEAN:"WHAT'S NEW?": When people in the Mentor booth were asked
by a long time customer: "What do you have new this year?" After thinking
a bit they found they couldn't answer with anything other than a simple
design manager tool.
MOST PERSONALLY GRATIFYING DAC PANEL: The HDL Summit. Ron Collett moderated
six panelists ranging from Verilog bigots to people using both to VHDL bigots.
As usual, Collett tried to conclude the panel with his usual spin that
VHDL was where everyone was going, etc. Just to yank his chain, I took great
joy in pointing out how, years ago, how a researcher at Dataquest had made
a now embarrassing prediction that VHDL users would outnumber Verilog in
early '92 -- which later turned out to be greatly exaggerated. That
Dataquest researcher was Ron Collett.
See you next year at DAC in San Francisco!
- John Cooley
the ESNUG guy
===========================================================================
Trapped trying to figure out a Synopsys bug? Want to hear how 3046 other
users dealt with it ? Then join the E-Mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG)!
!!! "It's not a BUG, jcooley@world.std.com
/o o\ / it's a FEATURE!" (508) 429-4357
( > )
\ - / - John Cooley, EDA & ASIC Design Consultant in Synopsys,
_] [_ Verilog, VHDL and numerous Design Methodologies.
Holliston Poor Farm, P.O. Box 6222, Holliston, MA 01746-6222
Legal Disclaimer: "As always, anything said here is only opinion."
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