> PROLIFIC KICKS ASS -- Competing in the same space, for some reason only
> one user spoke up for Zenasis this year.  (Earlier in DAC 04 #42 many were
> vocal, but not this year.)  In stark contrast, Prolific kicked ass here
> with many happy & some not so happy "real" users speaking up for them.
> This told me that the designers were actively using the Prolific tools for
> real optimization.  (In my book, mixed news is good news; if you only
> see happy-happy, joy-joy quotes they're almost always bullshit marketing
> ploys crafted to deceive you into buying their stuff.)  I'm not exactly
> sure what's going on at Zenasis this year.  My congrats to Prolific!
>
>     - from http://www.deepchip.com/items/else06-25.html


From: Dennis Harmon <dennis=user domain=zenasis spot mom>

Hi, John,

Do you actually read the crap you write before you post it up on DeepChip?

Having some knowledge of your educational background from the University of
Nowhere, one might be able to forgive your total lack of diction and poor
sentence structure.  However, I have to call you out on yet another one of
your crazy commentaries and nutty conclusions, specifically your Prolific
vs. Zenasis (ELSE 06 #25) story.  In your opening paragraph you conclude
based on the number of "actual user" responses to your recent survey that
Prolific had "kicked ass".

The fact is that only 6 of the 13 user responses were from CURRENT Prolific
users.  2 of the 13 mentioned Zenasis.  Also telling was that another 2 of
the 13 responses were Prolific users who had *dumped* the Prolific tool,
plus 3 more of the 13 had nothing to do with neither Zenasis nor Prolific.

"Kicked ass" is a sports cliche where one team completely dominates another.
An ass kicking in baseball is 18 to nothing; in soccer it's 10 to 2; in
football it's 42 to 3, etc.  When only 6 out of the 13 responses came from
CURRENT Prolific users in a survey that Zenasis did not participate in, you
demark this as "kicked ass"?! -- I think not!

Last but not least, 6 of the 13 were "Anonymous"; why should any EDA vendor
have to answer to people who are unwilling or too afraid to sign their own
comments and to be fairly rebutted?

Look "Super John", we have all heard for years now about how important you
think you are as the self-appointed protector of all those innocent and
helpless users of EDA.  All of us mortals know that being the only superhero
fighting the EDA evil-doers can be time consuming, but would it be too much
to ask that you actually perform detailed content and situational analysis
on your user feedback -- as opposed to a mindless "counting" of the number
of responses -- before rendering your opinion?  Finally, when you do provide
us with your rambling commentaries, could you PLEASE use an appropriate
cliche!!!

Finally, to answer your question "what's going on with Zenasis?"; we've
moved away from our old custom cell optimizer approach and instead have
shifted to an IPO approach.  (When I first got to Zenasis, our tools were
focused at the "power" users who had their own fabs.  Our tools were too
complex and hard to deploy for fabless designers.  Since then I've pushed
the company to make a new set of tools which are simpler and more self-
contained.  Now our fabless users don't need Cadabra, nor the hodgepodge
of scripts you used to need before.)  When we visit our customers, they
tell us they get better results compared to Prolific because we work at
the logical, physical, and transistor levels simultaneously -- something
Prolific doesn't do.

At DAC, we'll be showing our newest product, ZenTime-GT, our self-contained
in-place optimization tool, and ZenTime-PT which minimizes leakage power.

Yours truly,

    - Dennis Harmon, CEO
      Zenasis Technologies                       San Jose, CA