[ part 1 of 2: the conference itself & mostly front-end EDA tools ]
!!! "It's not a BUG, jcooley@world.std.com
/o o\ / it's a FEATURE!" (508) 429-4357
( > )
\ - / The Fifth Annual ESNUG/DAC Awards:
_] [_ "Mike Barnicle, Plagiarism, & DAC'98"
- or -
"106 Engineers Review DAC'98 in San Francisco, CA, June 15-19, 1998"
by John Cooley
Holliston Poor Farm, P.O. Box 6222, Holliston, MA 01746-6222
Legal Disclaimer: "As always, anything said here is only opinion."
"It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and
fury, signifying nothing."
- from Shakespeare's "MacBeth"
Gentle Readers:
Living under the Big-Brother-Is-Watching, Politically Correct shadow of
the Boston Globe (as I do because I live in Eastern Massachussetts), a day
now doesn't go by where you can't see on TV or read in the press some new
preachy, self-rightous "journalistic integrity" rant concerning how the
columnist Mike Barnicle plagiarised eight jokes from comedian George
Carlin's book, "Brain Droppings".
And you want to know what *I* think about this? I very sarcastically say:
"Big deal. Big fucking deal. Who the hell cares?"
And why I say this is because when I write, I haven't penned an original
idea in months and I really don't intend to change that way of thinking any
time soon! (In fact, I sometimes even go *out* *of* *my* *way* to avoid
having new ideas!) Why? Because truely new ideas are a lot of work to
cook up, and, most of the time, they turn out to be half-baked anyway.
God! -- I can't tell you the number of times, as a man, where I've had some
woman in my life (whether it be my girlfriend-du-jour, me mum, a friend, or
a co-worker) tell me how my innovative approach to some issue was "in
error", "wrong", "insensitive" or just plain "dumb-ass stupid". My male
married friends tell me the three stock phases that keep them out of the
divorce courts are:
1.) "Honey, I'm sorry, I was wrong."
2.) "Babes, I made a mistake; you were right."
3.) "No, Sweetie, you don't look fat in that dress."
Get out of the personal relationship domain, and, say, try bringing up new
ideas at work, and it gets worst! Now your female *and* male co-workers,
bosses, associates, competitors, and even random-people-off-the-street-who-
don't-even-know-you will all collectively gang up to *publically* tell you,
in no uncertain terms, how *YOUR* new idea was so totally wrong, so totally
NOT the solution, and so totally OUT-TO-LUNCH. I'm not kidding here. Human
societies, on RARE occassion, will *sometimes* reward the crackpots who go
against the herd *if* the herd happens to decide *at* *that* *very* *moment*
it wants to go in their new direction -- otherwise the *punishment* for
thinking differently will be swift and sure. And either way, they're still
seen as crackpots.
Some successful crackpots were: Martin Luther (the Protestant Reformation),
George Washington (the American Revolution), and Bill Clinton (established
that U.S. Presidents can do *anything* [ including chubby interns ] as long
as the U.S. economy is thriving). Some examples of failed crackpots: the
thousands of "heretics" burned at the stake for disagreeing with the Church;
the millions of "terrorists" who fought on the wrong side of revolutions;
and the millions of husbands and wives *immediately* divorced after being
caught cheating. And there's even an "Honorable Mention" group -- crackpots
who changed the world but paid for thinking differently anyway: Jesus Christ
(formed new religion; died on cross), Joan of Arc (liberation of France;
burned at stake), Socrates (founded Western philosophy; convicted pedophile
forced to drink poison), and again, Bill Clinton (two term US President
during sizzling ecomonic boom; forced to remain married to Hillary Clinton).
So, the message here for anyone with half a brain is clearly: "Keep your
yap shut and stop using that half of your brain that does work -- if you
don't want to be taking some SERIOUS risks with your life, liberty, and
pursuit of happiness!"
The real wisdom *I've* found that works comes from the newspaper columns
"Hints From Heloise", "Ann Landers", "Dear Abby", and "Miss Manners" -- and
that wisdom is it's always best to print *OTHER* people's letters, their
quotes, their problems with their solutions, and their new ideas _waaaaaay_
before you even think of toying with the idea of presenting your own
original material. To me, it's obvious that Mike Barnicle knew this smart
money approach to writing columns when he published George Carlin's jokes.
I do it, too, with the 1,000 (or so) user letters I republish in ESNUG
every year and even in this DAC'98 Trip Report. In this very DAC'98 Trip
Report you'll be lucky if you'll get 2 percent original material from me;
the remaining 98 percent of the ideas, opinions, and even the explainations
of how the new EDA technologies supposedly work have all been unabashedly
clipped/quoted/stolen by me from the 106 *other* DAC'98 Trip Reports *other*
people wrote when they returned home. This particular DAC Trip Report
doesn't just emit a faint odor of plagiarism -- it reeks of it! And I wish
to personally thank Mike Barnicle and George Carlin for finally making this
style of column writing now publically acceptable!
Or at least that's the way I see it. I could be wrong.
"Hypothetical Question: If married man speaks out loud in a forrest
and there's no woman there to hear him, is he still wrong?"
- joke overheard in local bar
"It's a good thing Bill Clinton finally confessed. The investigation
was getting tough when they DNA tested that dress... because they
just found out that all the people from Arkansas have the same DNA."
- another joke overheard in a local bar
LIVING LIFE LARGE: Reflecting the economic boom going on in the overall
U.S. economy, the total DAC'98 attendance grew by about 25 percent compared
to DAC'97. That is, DAC'97 had 17,398 total attendance; DAC'98 had about
21,675 total attendees (+/- 50 people). But that tells only part of the
story because total attendance includes EVERYONE -- professors, employees
of EDA vendors, guests, *and* customers. An even larger growth of roughly
41 percent (from DAC'97 to DAC'98) happened if you look at the numbers for
the DAC "Technical Attendees" -- i.e. the people actually interested in
*buying* the EDA tools being exhibited. DAC'97 had 7,387 technical
attendees; DAC'98 had 10,488 technical attendees.
Comparing this year's and last year's exhibitor list yields DAC'98 grew
by 21 percent with 38 new companies showing -- if you just counted names
on the exhibitor list. Do a little digging and you'll find that 31 of
those exhibitors were semiconductor houses -- so, looking at totals, the
number of *EDA* exhibitors has actually remained at around a constant 190.
But that 190 has had 40 vendors disappear and 44 new vendors replace them;
making the yearly turnover of EDA companies of around 22 percent. Of those
who have disappeared, some (like Cascade, Compapass, CCT, & Wellspring)
were bought out by the bigger EDA fish; a few (like Speed Electronic, &
KBS) simply went out of business; a couple did name changes (like Indus);
and, for a good number of the MIAs (like DS Diagonal, Emultek, Nextwave,
Neuw, & Technical Data Freeway) it's not widely known why they no showed.
"We believe that genuine technology innovation in the EDA market emerges
from focused startups rather than the major public players. One
non-scientific measure is the presence of at least 40 new startups at
DAC'98 compared with a year ago in DisneyLand."
- from a financial analyst's report of DAC'98
"The best giveaways were Dilbert toys from a bogus company whose demo
I only virtually observed (luckily). My daughter will be pleased!"
- a well-known Silicon Valley ASIC designer
MONEY _CAN_ BUY YOU LOVE: For the past two years, the DAC Plenary Sessions
(otherwise commonly known as the "DAC CEO Panels") have been totally lame-o
events. Prior to then, it was completely different. For example, at
DAC'95, Joe Costello (then CEO of Cadence) blurted out: "We're stuck in a
fixed-pie model. Have you seen three big dogs hovering over one bowl of
dog food? It's not a pretty picture." Aart De Geus (then CEO of Synopsys)
came back with: "If you think of yourself as a dog, you deserve dog food!"
Alain Hanover (then CEO of ViewLogic) said about his rebellious Chronologic:
"Our founding forefathers guaranteed us the right to life, liberty, the
pursuit of happiness and the right to sue each other." Gerry Hsu (then CEO
of ArcSys) took pot shots at Cadence by describing how bureaucratic it was
when he used to work there.
But amougst these rancorous exchanges we also got to openly discuss EDA
bugs, interoperability issues, pricing models, EDA vendors becoming
consulting houses, Verilog vs. VHDL, and much more. Yes, sometimes egos
were bruised, and sometimes people laughed -- yet we all walked away
knowing a bit more about the other guy's moccassins than before the event.
But, for the past two years, the DAC CEO panels have become controlled,
scripted affairs where more and more, less and less is being said. They've
replaced actual EDA users on the panel with academics and CEO "users" who
use bullshit management words like "paradigm shift", "resources", and "P&L
statements" in their day-to-day vernacular instead of engineering TLAs like
"ECO", "LRM", or "BFD". The audence is no longer allowed to ask questions.
And the soft, safe, fluffy questions asked of the CEOs were asked weeks in
advance so their staffs could craft long-winded soliloquies carefully
showing how *their* company's approach would save the day. Even a problem
child CEO like Gerry Hsu of Avant! (who has been embroilled in a long legal
spat with Cadence) was nowhere to be seen -- lest he accidently cause a
free exchange of ideas to happen.
"Why are they doing this?", you ask. The answer is Wall Street. Never
before has DAC seen so many investment bankers, analysts, and financial
types running around in an *engineering* conference. They're all trying
to get the inside scoop on chip design software. And the EDA execs are
trying to parlay that interest into higher stock prices by now *appearing*
to play nice with each other in public. Frank discussions with EDA CEOs
are a thing of the past now that Wall Street is here.
The Beatles were wrong with their song "Money Can't Buy Me Love". In the
EDA industry, we all love each other. Honest. Money *can* buy you love
these days. Or at least on DAC CEO panels it can.
"One other panel was of note was Gary Smith's annual DataQuest briefing
Sunday night where he reported DQ was forecasting a 10-15% downturn in
EDA tool sales. Gary indicated that this was due to the users not
believing the tools coming out could handle leading edge technologies
and are slowing down their purchases."
- an anonymous EDA executive
"Thirty Five Years of Design Automation Panel: It was an interesting
discussion but there were no real highlights. They showed some history
and said their predictions of the future (from the past) were so bad
that they did not want to do it again. They discussed tools/methods
and said (manager version here):
Tools have got to get better; so they will.
Engineers have got to get smarter; so they will.
IP happens.
Any questions?
- a Telecom designer
TRYING TO MAKE FORMAL BIG: Hoping to capitalize on the severe need for
verification engineers versus design engineers (with some estimates putting
the need as high as 5 verifiers for every designer) this year's DAC was
flooded with new Formal Verification tools all promising A Golden New Way
To Debug Designs. There are basically three kinds of formal verification
tools: equivalence checkers (EC), model checkers (MC), and pie-in-the-sky.
EC is the most common type of formal verification tool. Two of the EDA big
boys, Synopsys and Cadence, are even pitching their brand of EC to be used,
with their brand simulation and static timing analyzers (of course) as "next
generation sign-off". And it's widely rumored that Mentor R&D is in beta
with an EC tool and a static timing tool to follow suit.
"The demo of Prime Time and Formality was quite compelling. (Motive was
not represented in the booth, verifying that Synopsys is trying to kill
it ASAP in favor of Prime Time.) The interface for Prime Time is very
user friendly, with wizards and tabbed dialog boxes and spreadsheets
(cribbed from the interface of Synopsys's PC-based FPGA Compiler).
All this generates scripts that are compatible with the commands that
control Design Compiler. Prime Time also has statistical analysis
tools that are graphically tied into the Design Analyzer generated
schematics which helps you quickly locate the root cause of timing
problems. Formality, a logic equivalency checker, also has quite a
slick front end, and it is also tied into Design Analyzer. Their demo
showed how Formality could be quickly used to verify a hand-modified
netlist (the netlist was modified to correct a timing fault caught by
Prime Time). As a corollary, Formality could be used to check blocks
that have been implemented in schematics by hand (because of speed or
efficiency problems with synthesized logic) against the RTL code."
- a design engineer from a large semiconductor house
Technically, an Equivalence Checker (EC) works by comparing a golden design
(RTL or gates) against another design that's supposed to be functionaly
the "same". EC can easily deal with whole projects (500k - 1M gates)
overnight, but it depends heavily on both designs being structurally
simular. Designs that are structurally different generally have to be
broken into 10k gate modules for EC to work. Most EC tools support VHDL,
Verilog and EDIF. Set-up and day-to-day usability are still issues, but
debugging is really what separates the tools. Even though EC is used in
parallel with simulation at most of the bigger semiconductor companies, EC
tools are still overpriced for most engineers' desktops ($50k to $150k);
they have to drop to around $20k to go to main stream... Assuming the
$12.5 million Formal Verification market (1997 Dataquest est.) really does
go main stream.
"If you draw a big circle to represent verification, simulation as a
weapon still fills 90% of the job. Formal verification maybe covers
5%-15% and again it is hard to measure how much it overlaps with the
other tools. For what it costs, it doesn't do much."
- A West Coast design engineer
"ASIC flow breakdown:
Design and block level verification: 27%
Simulation: 46%
Emulation: 15%
Structural checking: 12%
Staffing is 2:1 of verification engineers to design engineers."
- Al Silbert of Nortel (on the Formal Verification Panel)
"Chrysalis' Design Verifyer (EC) despite being hard to set up and
expensive, has a nice Tcl interface for user programmability, and a
good schematic based debugger. It has the advantage of being the
oldest, most debugged EC tool on the market. They're also trying
for MC, in a limited but pragmatic way.
The great advantage Formality from Synopsys (EC) has is it integrates
nicely into a Design Compiler based design flow. In addition, Formality
has one of the best EC debugging interfaces. The criticism that
Formality and Design Compiler may contain shared code misses the mark
slightly, but that's a discussion too long to go into here.
Cadence's Affirma (EC) is a "me, too" product. It integrates FV into
their simulation environment, which makes for only one user interface
to learn. Their use of Composer to display a schematic provides a
familiar user interface, but doesn't allow the user to use the
schematic to explore the design.
Abstract (EC and MC) and Verysys (EC and MC) are both repackaged
Siemens technology. These tools are not as easy to use, nor as easy to
integrate into a flow as their major competitors. Verysys' debugging
interface to their EC tool that is very competitive, though. It's
rumored that Intel has bought stock in Abstract, but that hasn't made
an impact on their tools yet.
Avanti's Lynx (EC) is just VFormal from the Compass take-over, & hasn't
been touched since the take-over. Verplex (EC), Formalized Design
(EC & MC) and Fujitsu (EC & MC) are all very late newcomers this year
to the market. Mentor is also rumored to be working on an EC tool,
too. It's doubtful how any of these tools will fare in this already
crowded market."
- Simon Read, a Formal Verification consultant & ex-developer
"Equivalence Checking is now so mature that they were almost selling
it from hand carts out in the street like it was hotdogs. Not so
sure who was buying though."
- a European design engineer
"a) Chrysalis: Oldest, overpriced.
b) Synopsys Formality: Best interface with Synth and timing
c) Verisys: Looks promising, but nothing stands out
d) Abstract FV: Cool debug with auto simulation and waveform output
e) Bell Labs: Formalcheck V: This looked the best last year
f) Formal Verification: Small company in the back room
Too many players for such a niche market. Hopefully one or two of
them will "do an MTI" and have a useable product at a low price and
cause a fallout and a launch into mainstream use."
- Peet James of Qualis Design
Model Checking (MC) answers "what if?" and "is it possible that?" questions
about a single design. MC only works on small designs of about 300
flip-flops or less because it suffers from "state explosion" -- the time
and/or memory needed doubles with every state bit you add. MC can detect
and help fix subtle interacting FSM bugs -- which is why engineers like
about MC -- because it catches bugs that would be hard to catch via most
simulation runs. Market-wise, Bell Labs, 0-in, and the DAC'98 newbies
Silicon Forrest and Formalized Design are all basically home grown MC tools.
Abstract and Versys are reselling warmed-over MC technology they got from
Siemens years earlier. (Oddly, it's rumored that Cadence's Ken MacMillan
put a *free* model checker out on the Cadence web site.)
"FormalCheck (MC) from Bell Labs (BLDA) can process larger designs than
its competitors. Their graphical user interface has very well thought
out features to help write & manage queries and novel, useful debugging
features. They've added a batch oriented interface for automating
regression tests. Let's see how they fare after Cadence buys them."
- Simon Read, a Formal Verification consultant & ex-developer
"The Bell Labs, 0-in, and Silicon Forrest (MC) tools are different in
that they let the user query (or they do directed searches) for very
esoteric bugs in designs which makes them technologically popular.
Every engineer secretly frets over that one missed Pentium bug that
haunts them for the rest of their careers."
- an East Coast design engineer
"Formal Verification is still sold as insurance. The sales pitch is
basically a scare tactic. 'You need this $150K tool, or you may miss
a bug'. Engineers love finding these hyper elusive bugs, and can
get lost in the search for them. It wastes time and robs from
mainstream target bug finders like simulation. Again, it is very hard
to see if Formal Verification is cost-effective or not."
- Peet James of Qualis Design
"The best way to change methodologies is to start slowly, as Synopsys
did when it came to market with gate-level optimization. Only later
did Synopsys move people upstream to RTL synthesis. Contrast that to
Silc, which tried to introduce behavioral synthesis in the mid-1980s,
which turned out to be 10 years too early."
- Richard Goering of EE Times
SYNTHESIS GOES FORMAL? In ancient Greek mythology "centaurs" were creatures
who were half-human & half-horse. Other than being novelties, "centaurs"
never partook in anything of consequence in Greek myths. The EDA world's
version of centaurs is "Formal Synthesis" -- a useless beastie that's
half-formal and half-synthesis. Normal synthesis works by running
step-by-step transforms on RTL code to eventually convert it to optimized
gate level designs. A typical synthesis transform may be "initial mapping
of RTL to gates" or "inserting extra buffers according to specific fan-out
rules" or "doing specific boolean optimizations on logic cones". Formal
Synthesis anal retentively ensures that each transform used is "proven"
mathematically so no possible errors going from spec to gates ever happen.
"Nobody makes designs with flawless specs. We sort of craft the spec
and the design along the way with the verification guys looking over
our sholders. We know 90 percent of what we're trying to design going
in. It's that last 10 percent that makes designing interesting. I
don't want errors in my designs, but the promises and limitations of
formal synthesis are about as useful as tits on a bull."
- a design engineer from Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
"Abstract and Derivation Systems both market formal synthesis tools,
both claim that their tools allow designers to 'explore the solution
space'. To most designers, who are often unskilled in mathematical
techniques, these tools will 'constrain the solution space' rather
than simply 'prevent mistakes'. Formal synthesis is really only
applicable where a lack of bugs is a paranoid, overriding concern."
- Simon Read, a Formal Verification consultant & ex-developer
"IP", YOU PEE, WE ALL PEE ON "IP": Remember how at last year's DAC each EDA
vendor annoyingly somehow found a way to work the phrase "Deep Sub Micron"
into their customer pitches? Well, this year's Most Tired Phrase used at
DAC was "IP" -- Intellectual Property. Everyone and their grandmother
somehow fenagled a way to work *their* product as being somehow absolutely
*critical* for IP use and/or developement. "Are you making some IP?" Call
Cadence, Mentor, Synopsys, blah, blah, blah, (the list goes on and on) for
their tools. "Want to actually *buy* some IP?" Call Argonaut, Artisan,
ARM, Aspec, Avanti, Cadence, CAST, CoreEl, CSELT, Denali, Design & Reuse,
Duet, Eonic, Interra, Mentor, Phoenix, Sagantec, Sierra, Silicon Access,
Synopsys (and whoever else I've missed.) And, to make matters worst, now
all the God Damned foundries and semiconductor houses are getting into the
same bloody IP game, too! (2nd try): "Want to buy some IP? " Call IBM,
TSMC, Motorola, LSI,... And, not to be left out of the party, all the
FPGA/CPLD vendors are sharing in the same terribly unoriginal idea, also!
(3rd try): "Psst! Hey, Buddy, Wanna buy some IP?" Call Xilinx, Altera,
Actel, Cypress,... Enough IP already!
"Great parts produce great vices, as well as virtues."
- from Plato's fourth letter to Dionysius II, the ruler of Syracuse
"Parts is parts."
- the catch phrase to a Wendy's Old Fashioned Hamburger restaurant
ad campaign of a few years years ago
"Do you remember a few years ago that televised Republican National
Convention where the candidates kept strongly supporting 'family
values' over and over, yet none of them could define what 'family
values' were? IP was the 'family values' of [this year's] DAC."
- a Texas design engineer
"Personally, I don't get it -- all this hype around IP. Essentially
the IP vendors want to be tax collectors. They want a nickle a chip
for every chip their IP is in. We've seen dozens of IP vendors but
haven't invested in any of them."
- Mark Stevens of Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm
"Cadence had a special meeting for all their big time customers in
which they were spreading their propaganda of the future of the IC
industry. In this meeting they discussed how the future industry
will require more system integrators than logic designers because of
the IP industry. Their projection is that IC suppliers will incorporate
more third party IP cores and less custom designs. After they were
done, several Cadence marketing guys were seated at each table to
discuss our reaction to their presentation. At that point several
people at our table began to turn their theory into swiss cheese."
- a Lucent engineer
"Sand Microelectronics: I could not bare to talk to these guys in
light of all the problems the [name deleted] team has had."
- an anon design engineer
IN LAWYERS WE TRUST: Very traumatically at this year's DAC, the IP business
has run into its very first technological breakdown. The funny thing is
that many engineers may have not picked up on this yet. The Great
Divide that has separated IP has been how it has been delivered to the
end customer; it's either soft core IP (like Verilog or VHDL source code
or netlists) or hard core (like polygon oriented GDS-II files). Soft cores
have traditionally had protection/reverse-engineering problems concerning
how to keep questionable characters from simply copying it, tweaking it a
bit, and then reselling it as their own unique IP. To fight this, LEDA's
Kypton does confusing VHDL-to-VHDL scrambling; Chronologic's VMC converts
Verilog into unreadable compiled code, and now Topdown offers something
simular. But all these solutions each have some technical or business
Achilles' heel leaving soft core IP vendors still nervously relying on legal
threats to protect their family jewels. Conversely, hard cores, being
essentially polygons, have been much, much harder to reverse-engineer, and,
as a result, have been intrinsically more secure. That is, until now...
Laughingly, the one EDA company most plagued with lawsuits from day one of
its inception, Avanti, is now widely marketing a tool it got from the
Compass aquisition called Lynx-LB that REVERSE COMPILES full-custom block
implementations (i.e. GDS-II files) back into synthesizable Verilog or VHDL
RTL! Formalized Design also offered a reverse compiler that reads in EDIF
or SPICE files and regenerates RTL Verilog or VHDL. And it's rumored that
Cadence and Sagantec might be working on something similar. Ostensively
such tools are to make design migration of old IP into new applications
doable -- but now what's to stop a Cadence or Synopsys Consulting Services
or even your TSMC support engineer from using these very same tools to
"migrate" your hot IP into their own cache of designs? Now the hard core
IP vendors (and now even *anyone* submitting designs to foundries) have to
do what the soft core vendors have been doing all along: nervously rely on
legal threats to protect your IP family jewels.
"Circuit Semantics has a tool called DynaBlock that can take an Hspice
netlist (extracted from a full-custom layout using Arcadia or Star-RC),
recognizes functional gates from the transistor connectivity, and
characterizes the functional gates. The user gets a gate-level Verilog
netlist and a Synopsys timing library (*.lib) for the gates in the
netlist. This tool is useful to extract functionality and timing
from legacy cores or hard IP's. They claim it can process 100k
transistors in three hours.
Compared to Avanti's Lynx-LB:
Dynablock extracts a gate-level Verilog netlist, not an HDL boolean
model like Lynx-LB.
Dynablock extracts timing models that are acceptable to standard cell
methodologies, such as Synopsys' Design Compiler.
Avanti claims that SGS Thompson has used Lynx-LB successfully on designs
of 900k transistors in about 20 minutes.
Synopsys/Epic's Coremill is supposed to be similar to Lynx-LB and
DynaBlock, but we never get a chance to see it."
- a Silicon Valley chip designer
"Lay not up for yourselves treasure upon earth, where moth and rust
doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal."
- Matthew 6:19
"YES, WE HAVE NO BANANAS" Take a college course in logic & sematics
sometime and you'll find yourself in a final exam analyzing Venn diagrams
about apparently contradictory statements like "Yes, we have no bananas".
Yes, while in the full scan world, Mentor's Fastscan and Synopsys' Test
Compiler still remain the biggest technology contenders; the biggest splash
at DAC came from ATG Technology with its powerful NO SCAN ATPG tool. And
again, yes, Sunrise is quite well known in the partial scan world, from some
customer's reports it appears ATG Tech's NO SCAN ATPG tool seems to be
getting very good results generating significant coverage for designs that
have NO SCAN access whatsoever. Whoa! The only other no scan solution more
popular was BIST, which has improved dramatically in the last few years.
"Logicvision was by far the most impressive. While having all our
buffers defined as BiDi's could be somewhat of a task for the tool,
the ability to add BIST to an analog cell was very impressive. They
demonstrated the tool's accuracy by adding BIST to a PLL. The algorithm
would measure and characterize the PLL, including the very to difficult
to measure jitter. While the simulation demo was enough to convince me,
Logicvision went even farther by setting up a demo board with an
off-the-shelf PLL which the tool characterized by downloading the BIST
logic into an FPGA (sorry guys, it was "X"). While the BIST logic
tested the PLL, an oscilloscope was setup to probe the various points
on the PLL to show how closely the waveforms matched the simulated
results. The accuracy looked to be within 5%. The advantage of this
is that only one tester is needed to test both analog and digital."
- an East Coast engineer (Lucent)
"I'm curious about Duet's automatic scan chain insertion for IP blocks.
I'll be over at their booth."
- an anon engineer while on the DAC floor
"TSSI presented their test insertion product and test vector preparation
product in which their demo hung. The test insertion product was poor
compared to Sunrise or Synopsys test compiler. The test vector product
looked state of the art in terms of automation, capability, flexibility
etc. Functional blocks are selected in a GUI, interconnected and the
process kicked off from the GUI, although the most capable this is the
demo that hung. Something bothers me when demos of test products hang."
- an Arizona chip designer
DARWIN GOES ESDA AWARD: Goes to Summit Design. With i-Logix gone, Speed
dead, KBS gone, Vista gone, Mentor redoing Renior to have the *exact*
look & feel of Summit's Visual HDL, and Escalade not capturing even a
fraction of the ESDA market share they originally bragged they'd have,
Summit design has moved on to expanding into code coverage, HW/SW co-design,
waveform viewing, text2graphics, and is even flirting with behavioral
synthesis by sharing its DAC bed with its new live-in girlfriend, Dasys.
While some of the new ESDA players, like the awkwardly named mouthful "China
Integrated Circuit Design Center" (offering it's Panda VDE visual design
capture/debug/sim toolset) aren't being taken seriously because nobody wants
to risk *their* career on EDA software of questionable support & reliability
-- one new set of ESDA tools, Novas' DeBussy, surprisingly caught the fancy
of many user's eyes. On top of all the usual ESDA FSM stuff, users were
wowed at how Debussy recognizes synthesis elements early in the design
process and checks for synthesis syntax errors; how nSchema annotates a
schematic with SDF info plus clock tree analysis plus having asynchronous
signal paths recognized; how nTrace displays memory contents plus driver
and load tracing.
"Novas' Debussy is a major leap forward in GUI's, compared to Virsim
(which I sell) and SignalScan, which still looks like the old
SunWindows. Debussy takes the best ideas from many tools and adds in
synthesis to make a real winner. I don't know how it performs on large
designs, but the demo looked great. The source code browser annotates
the code with signal values, as does the schematic tool. The schematic
for their simple circuit was made very readable by doing partial
synthesis to recognize muxes and ALUs. Lastly, their state machine
tool did a nice job of creating a diagram, but the example only had
5 states. How good was the tool? I saw the Virsim project manager
watching a demo!
- a Virsim salesman
"The best niche tool? Debussy by Novasoft. It was a really cool
Verilog debugging tool. You could even capture the contents of memory
and view it through time. All the windows are very well integrated."
- a design engineer from Texas
"Escalade: I am going to bring Escalade in to demonstrate their
DesignBook front end HDL design tool. This product competes with
Renoir and VisualHDL. I am a little concerned because they have
focused on building tools to protect Intellectual Property this year.
The new tools are based on DesignBook but they refocused their target
market this year. If they spread themselves too thin (like MicroSim
did last year) they will be gone next year. In my opinion, DesignBook
is one of the top three front end tools.
Summit: When I checked out Summit's VisualHDL, I told them they had
the best graphical front end design tool for Verilog. The only problem
was that I couldn't afford it. They said to let them work on a way to
solve that problem. (Don't hold your breath. <G>)
Renoir: We had an in house demo of Renoir two weeks before DAC so I
didn't look at it at DAC. Renoir is my first choice right now. It is
less risky than Escalade's DesignBook and more affordable than Summit's
VisualHDL."
- a Telecom oriented designer
"John, I just wanted to express my thanks for the jump-start your ESDA
design shoot out of two years ago had on Mentor. Renoir, our high-level
design capture tool, has now passed the 25% market share point and is
rapidly displacing Summit. It wouldn't have happened without the
wake-up call your contest gave to our "System Architect" product. It
is now a multimillion dollar per year high profit generator for Mentor.
My thanks."
- Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics, in ESNUG 278 #3
BIG IRON VS. LE TOUR DE FRANCE: Two years ago at DAC'96, at least a dozen
companies (SpeedSim, Frontline, Fintronic, Synopsys, Vantage, Chronologic,
Pendulum, Cadence, Cadence Alta, Synopsys, Mentor (rumored), and CAE Plus)
had or were working on a cycle-based simulator. It was like the R&D staffs
from these companies all called the same psychic hotline for advice. Now,
two years later, Pendulum disappeared, Fintronic & CAE Plus are still
around, and the rest of the cycle-based simulators have been gobbled up
in the EDA food chain to end up either in Cadence, Synopsys, Avanti, or
Zycad -- with the major players being Synopsys and Cadence in a weird way.
Cycle-based simulators evaluate boolean equations -- which means they're
great at simulating gate-level logic as long as you're ONLY interested in
FUNCTION and NOT TIMING. Non-cycle-based simulators handle TIMING very
well, but generally aren't nearly as fast as cycle-based simulators. As
a result, there are very few EDA users of pure cycle-based simulators. (For
example, Cadence's COBRA only has seven customers). But, the Chronologic
whizkids found a way to merge Roadrunner cycle-based technology within their
compiled Verilog VCS such that VCS runs cycle-based on the non-timing parts
of simulations and compiled on the remaining parts. (It's rumored that
Cadence is trying to do this with NC-Verilog but no one can confirm it.)
Now let's look at the hardware emulation/acceleration world which is in
essence a speeding up of the simulation of gates. Quickturn, Mentor, Aptix,
IKOS, and Zycad all got into this business *before* cycle-based simulation
was widely used. Now that EDA software has found a savvy way to speed up
gate simulation, those old half-million dollar Big Iron solutions suddenly
aren't so appealing to EDA users. (It's not that software simulation
beats Big Iron in performance -- it's that software now has sped up
simulation enough to make pricey Big Iron more of a luxary than necessity.)
The Big Iron guys are fighting for their survival. That's why Quickturn
sued Mentor to block them from selling Big Iron in the US. (And that
lawsuit is why Mentor has recently put out a takeover bid on Quickturn.)
Survivial is also why Quickturn bought out ARKOS from Synopsys last year
(even after aquiring equivalent an ARKOS-like technology, IBM's COBALT)
-- and it's why Quickturn did a If-You-Can't-Beat-Them-Join-Them purchase
of little old 33 employee SpeedSim in Jan '97 for the inflated price of $55
million. It's also why Quickturn wrapped this all together to squeeze out
its Mercury Design Verification system which is essentially an event-driven
Verilog behavioural simulator with 74 FPGAs and 2 PowerPCs tacked on to
speedily simulate a million gate design (w/ pricing of $395K for 500K gates
and around $1 million for a 2 million gates.) Gotta fight to survive!
Big Iron old timer IKOS and Big Iron DAC newbies Axis and VeriPOD have all,
more or less, mimicked Quickturn technologically in trying have customers
simulate RTL on some type of reconfigurable hardware. So far, financially
Quickturn and IKOS have announced revenue drops. Nobody knows how the
newbies Axis and VeriPOD will fare.
"Subject: For Sale -- One QUICKTURN hardware emulator
We have a Quickturn hardware emulator which we no longer wish to
support in our flow. Anyone interested in this device should contact
my boss, David Burleson at: David.Burleson@Sciatl.com"
- Tom Coonan
Scientific Atlanta (from ESNUG 295 #9)
"Axis: combines debuggability and speed. Look, Act and Feel like a
software simulator running at hardware speed.
- Simulates up to 2M gates on 8 boards plugged into PCI bus on Sun.
- Costs around $250K. Limitation is cost of high end Altera parts.
- Speed 10K - 100K cycles/sec
- No synthesis - directly executes behavioral RTL.
- Start simulation with $rccon to run fast, then switch to $rccoff
shortly before failure to do a pure software debug.
Would be great to have this for $10K so that every designer could have
one. Its value at $250K is a lot harder to justify."
- a Silicon Valley chip designer
"I think it stinks how easily EDA companies can chop and change their
product line leaving customers high and dry. It has happened so
many times in the last 10 years I am suprised anyone wants to buy
CAD tools any more!
- a European EDA user commenting on Synopsys selling ARKOS to
Quickturn two weeks after DAC'97
"Mentor is OEMing QuickHDL-XLC from Topdown Design. Topdown calls it
Cyclops. According to TD salesman, it's a Verilog pre-processor
that levelizes even-driven simulations to make them cycle-based.
Sells for $23,000 which is cheaper than NC-Verilog or VCS."
- an anon engineer
NICE HORSEY! In the early days of EDA, when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth
and people knew who Carver Mead was, before synthesis, there used to be
something sorta like proto-synthesis that was called "datapath compilation".
In fact, there was even a company called Silicon Compilers that used to sell
datapath compilers. And, it being the Age of EDA Dinosaurs and all, Mentor
Graphics was around and Mentor did what it does best. It bought Silicon
Compilers and destroyed it. Time went by. Synthesis was discovered. Silc
and Synopsys and Synergy and Exemplar and Booledozer and Veribest and
Synplicity and ACEO and Ambit came along. Some died, a few thrived, and a
few are still struggling to survive even today. And datapath compilation
suddenly reappeared out of nowhere. A very small company, Silerity, down
in Los Angeles, offered a nascent tiling datapath compiler, PathBlazer, in
'94. Viewlogic then bought Silerity in '95, and after a failed attempt at
trying to market PathBlazer, View followed that time honored Mentor
tradition and killed it. Time passed. Synthesis giant, Synopsys, bought
SiArc and found it had accidentally acquired a SiArc in-house datapath
compiler in the purchase. Secret microphones planted within Synopsys R&D
at the time picked up the following: "Ewww... A datapath compiler... How
disgusting! Let's erase the hard drive and pretend we never found it...",
then there's a garbled disagreement, followed by the sounds of a physical
struggle. Months later, Synopsys markets an equation-based/non-tiling-based
SiArc datapath compiler under the name "Module Compiler". And around the
same time, two other unrelated companies, Tera Systems and Arcadia, also
introduce their own tiling-based datapath compilers, and a long lost EDA
niche is reborn. And, although Module Compiler appears to be making a lot
of money for Synopsys, it appears that a lot of users at this DAC were
quite mesmerized by Arcadia's Mustang. Nice horsey!
"Additionally, our pulse of field contacts on which new products are
hot revealed some surprises: ... [ stuff deleted ] ... Module Compiler
(datapath synthesis tool) is enabling SNPS sales reps to exceed quota.
We were skeptical about SNPS' marketing claims when the product was
announced 1-2 quarters ago, that Module Compiler could sell 1-for-1
with Design Compiler (control logic synthesis). Most SNPS' field reps
agree that the 1:1 ratio is too generous, but the product is ramping
exceedingly well and customers like it (we independently discussed
with users)."
- from a financial analyst's report of DAC'98
"The most interesting tool was Arcadia Mustang because the approach is
so novel. It takes your regularly synthesized netlist and deduces the
regularity from it to do datapath placement. I'm surprised it could
work, but apparently they have success with it. IBM included the tool
in their ASIC flow. There was also an interesting paper in the DAC
Proceedings evaluating the results of commercial datapath compilers.
They don't name names, but you can have fun trying to figure out which
vendor they're talking about :-)"
- a California engineer
A BATTLE OF PROXIES: Whereas Synopsys likes to see itself as a "serious"
player in the FPGA/CPLD synthesis game, the truth is that the real players
in that market are Exemplar, Synplicity, the freeware FPGA synthesis tools
that the FPGA vendors give out themselves (like Altera's MaxPlus II), and
the it-might-as-well-be-freeware software that Minc/Synario/IST "gives" out.
Last year's DAC was Synplicity's "coming out party" -- literally they had
grown to the point where they were sponsoring parties big enough at DAC
that other EDA rivals were attending uninvited -- Synplicity had finally
arrived in EDA. This year's DAC was no different: Bob Russo, the Synopsys
Senior VP of Worldwide Sales & Services, was unexpectedly seen at the
Synplicity after hours Top Of The Marriott party! On the technical side,
Synplicity announced an FPGA floorplanning tool that caught the interest of
many engineers -- but no one reported on it in technical detail. Another
company that has a well-known FPGA floorplanner is Morphologic with its
"MorphMCFP". Targeting the big FPGA's (like the Lucent 2C, 2T, 3C, & 3T
series plus the Xilinix XC4000E/EX/L/XL series), MorphMCFP lets engineers
automatically translate/partition designs between FPGAs with complete
compliance to each device's design rules. It does automatic I/O allocation
and de-allocation (as needed) and the floorplanner instantly retimes the
newly placed design as feedback to the engineer. Is Synplicity's new FPGA
floorplanner this sophisticated? We don't known. On the business side,
Synplicity also demostrated a wee bit of business acumen in cutting a deal
to OEM ModelTech's combined Verilog-VHDL simulator. (Model Tech & Exemplar
are both divisions of Mentor! Talk about each division being its *own*
profit & loss center within Mentor! Whoa!)
"I spent some time in Synplicity's booth looking at their new release.
They have added a bunch of new debug features but nothing drastic.
Symplicity and Exemplar keep pushing each other. Their fight for
marketshare based on features and price is great for users.
Exemplar still has the best value in Synthesis. The new Spectrum
release looks great. I will have to play with it before I pass
judgement on whether it works as well as it looks. It has orders of
magnitude more control of the synthesis process than Synplicity at a
fraction of the cost of Synopsys. The new constraint editor is the
first usable one I have seen on any synthesis tool. I heard from an
Exemplar wheel that Exemplar's growth last year was equal to
Synplicity's total revenue. Both Exemplar and Synplicity have realized
that the quality of their synthesis is often compromised by FPGA place
and route tools. They are integrating the vendor specific P&R tools
into their GUIs and linking the synthesis and floor planning tools.
- a West Coast designer
"Marketing and marketing clout will beat technology every time."
- Mark Stevens of Sequoia Capital, a venture capital firm
"THE MAN WITHOUT A COUNTRY" In American folklore there's a famous story
about some poor sap who committed a horrible crime and flippantly told the
judge that he wished he didn't have a country. The guy was sentanced to
spending the rest of his life aboard sailing ships never setting foot in
*any* country. ACEO is like this, but it's "A Company Without A Customer".
For over seven years I've run a quasi-guerilla style mailing list (ESNUG)
that has over 6,000 EDA users (worldwide) reading and responding to it
weekly. In its entire seven year history I have, as of yet, to find anyone
"on" or "off the record" ever talk about or even hint at having thought of
trying ACEO's "Gatran" synthesis tool. Not one. Never. Nada. "Yes, we
don't know what you're talking about." And yet ACEO claims to have had
*hundreds* of customers over these past four years! And now ACEO annouced
"Asyn" -- a "one pass hierarchical synthesis tool" -- and "Softwire" -- a
multi-FPGA partitioning tool -- at this year's DAC. Hello, McFly! Is
anyone home? Hello!
"Again, this is a loaded question. Richard, I don't have an answer
for all of that. Two year have passed. The last time I was on the
CEO panel was two years ago. During these two years a lot things
have happened. OK, many people think, uh, said things about me,
about us. But one thing you not says is that I have not brought
entertainment value to you, this industry."
- Gerry Hsu, CEO of Avanti, while on the DAC'97 CEO Panel,
responding to the question of why EDA start-ups seem so
successful in developing new technologies so quickly.
"You've had a lot of fun -- a *lot* of fun -- that you've had an
opportunity to attack me. Just think how much you're going to be
missing. You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, because,
gentlemen, this is my last press conference."
- Richard Nixon after he lost the 1962 election to be
the governor of California
Next Week: [ part 2 of 2: the back-end & the other new EDA tools/ideas ]
===========================================================================
Trying to figure out a Synopsys bug? Want to hear how 6,000+ 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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