> Mentor (booth 928) is also showing its repackaged version of ModelSim plus
> 0-in which they're now calling "Questa 6.2".  It seems to have all sorts
> of cheery features that Synopsys and Cadence also have.  Ask for Stephen
> Bailey.  Synopsys (booth 3773) this year seems obsessed with talking up
> how "hot, Hot, HOT!" System Verilog supposedly is and they'll be pitching
> all the happy links VCS & Magellan has to it.  Ask for Tom Borgstrom.
> Freebie: 3-in-1 color pens
>
>     - from http://www.deepchip.com/gadfly/gad072006.html


From: Clive Maxfield <max=user domain=techbites hot calm>

Hi John,

I thought you might be interested in a nugget of info I picked up at DAC.
As you know, SystemC provides a variety of datatypes.  These include
arbitrary-bit-width datatypes for integers and fixed-point values, but
these native versions simulate very slowly.  This is why last month (June
2006) Mentor announced the immediate availability of arbitrary-bit-width
fixed-point and floating-point datatypes based on ANSI C++ that simulate
10x to 200x faster than the native SystemC versions.

But (much like the song "Alice's Restaurant") that's not what I'm here to
tell you about.  While I was wandering the floor at DAC, I bumped into an
old friend -- simulation expert Alex Zamfirescu -- who dragged me over to
his Fintronic booth to show me what they had been up to.

Fintronic (http://www.fintronic.com) are the ones who make the "Super
FinSim" Verilog simulator.  The point is that they've just introduced
arbitrary-bit-width fixed-point and IEEE 754/854 floating-point datatypes
(they say "objects, functions, and math operators") into Verilog.  Unlike
the native Verilog datatypes that are limited in size, the Fintronic
versions can essentially be as large as you want them to be.

The end result is that, using pure Verilog syntax, you can mix-and-match
these new datatypes with native Verilog datatypes, and you can perform all
trigonometric and hyperbolic (direct and inverse) functions -- along with
power, logarithm, and square root operations -- using any format and
precision (Fintronic also supports user-selected rounding and special
condition reporting).

I thought that this was pretty interesting, because it lets one perform
very high-level algorithmic evaluations without ever leaving your home
Verilog environment.

    - Clive Maxfield
      Techbites Interactive, Inc.                Madison, AL