> Dean mentioned in his post that Toshiba already uses CeltIC NDC, the de-
> facto industry standard SI signoff solution in their design flows.  Our
> Encounter Timing System (ETS) is a no-brainer here.  Dean should just
> use ETS.  It's solace for disgruntled PrimeTime users.  Problem solved. 
> 
>     - David Desharnais of Cadence
>       http://www.deepchip.com/items/0459-10.html


From: Kevin Drucker <kdrucker=user domain=violin-technologies not calm>

Hi, John,

I'm at a small startup and we're in the process of evaluating EDA tools as
we put together our design flow.  As you are probably aware, Cadence has
entered the "sign-off STA/SI" arena with its Cadence ETS-XL tool which is
supposed to roll up their three SignalStorm, CeltIC and CTE engines into
one tool.

The engineers on our team are long-time PrimeTime users.  We have an awful
lot of experience and confidence in using PrimeTime for our chips and as our
golden STA sign-off tool.  (Although we view CeltIC as our golden SI engine).

Cadence, however, is offering us some fairly attractive pricing on ETS-XL,
and being a start-up, cash is king.  We're giving serious consideration to
switching over to ETS-XL, but we're very concerned about going with an STA
tool that we have not seen proven.

The "Catch-22" is, as a start-up, we don't have a set of existing known-good
designs on which to really baseline and wring out ETS on.  We can't properly
evaluate this new STA tool under a wide-range of corners, timing-modes and
other stress-conditions that we trust.

Do any of your readers have any hands-on experience with this ETS-XL?  If so,
how does it stack up with PrimeTime in terms of reliability and accuracy on
high speed (500+ Mhz) designs and at what process nodes have they used it?

Has anyone anywhere ACTUALLY "signed-off" a real chip (i.e. not a test chip)
using ETS-XL and validated its numbers on the working silicon?

I'm sorry for the urgency on this, John, I am under pressure to close our EDA
contracts by early next year, like in the Q1'07 time frame.  Could you get
this up ASAP on DeepChip?  I'd really like to know if anyone out there has a
technical opinion on this Cadence ETS-XL tool.  As a new start-up, we don't
want to be penny wise and pound foolish on STA.

Happy holidays...

    - Kevin Drucker
      Violin Technologies                        Iselin, NJ