( ESNUG 230 Item 3 ) ---------------------------------------------- [11/16/95]
Subject: (ESNUG 228 #9 229 #1) Syn DW PCI Sucks; But LMC's PCI Is Fantastic!
>My company has had considerable experience with Synopsys's DesignWare PCI
>product, most of it quite bad. Their basic problem was using a group of
>software developers to essentially design hardware while learning hardware
>design on the fly. They clearly had no experience with logic design at this
>level of complexity and this shows in the quality of their current product,
>as it is far from functionally correct. .... (But) We used the product
>from Logic Modeling (now owned by Synopsys) and can recommend it to be quite
>competent. The LMC group which developed the bus functional model is
>entirely separate from the group which developed the DesignWare PCI
>controller and should not suffer from association.
From: bouchier@news.eng.convex.com (Paul Bouchier)
John,
We've used the Synopsys/Logic Modelling PCI master/slave and compliance test
suite. Apart from a small amount of difficulty getting it to work in a "not
quite zero delay" environment, it worked great. The Verilog part of it is
quite difficult to understand, because it seems to be a machine generated
translation of something originally written in LMC's native modeling
language. However, phone support quality was good.
One issue you have to deal with is arranging for something on the inboard
side of your PCI interface to generate transactions as required by the
master suite, and to accept transactions as required by the slave suite.
It seemed that the compliance suite does a fairly good job of testing all the
types of PCI transactions with lots of corner cases in hundreds of different
ways. It can also check compliance to PCI timing specs. It found a bug in
our chip, so it paid for itself. Be aware that the compliance suite as it
ships out of the box only checks the last data item during a block transfer.
The master & slave are also handy for using as general purpose models to
validate operation of the system as a whole. Generally you'll do more than
just run the compliance tests. So you'll need a PCI master/slave to interact
with your system. The biggest issue here is getting things sync'ed up so
the models do the right thing when the other side of your design expects it.
- Paul Bouchier
Convex Computers
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