( ESNUG 372 Item 13 ) ------------------------------------------- [05/31/01]
Subject: Avanti Does NOT Hold Us Hostage Any More Than Synopsys/Cadence Do
> Dan's experience isn't unique. "Just don't heap too much praise upon
> Avanti until you get to know them," warned Dale Lomelino of Philips
> Semiconductors. "If anything, they have more warts and blemishes than
> Synopsys and Cadence combined. Avanti does not want to support standard
> formats like PDEF or LEF/DEF. Instead, they prefer to lock you into
> their 'unified binary Milkyway database' -- and hold you hostage."
>
> What use is any Best In Class P&R tool if you can't interface to it?
>
> - from "That Other Avanti Issue" ( EE Times 5/07/01 )
From: John McGehee <johnm@voomtown.com>
Hi, John,
Lately I have been reading in ESNUG users having trouble interfacing to
Avanti tools. Interfacing any two tools is difficult, but I do not think
that interfacing to Avanti is any harder than to other tools.
It's my job at Voom to build a multi-vendor flow that tapes out chips. I
do this using industry standard formats supported by Avanti, like Verilog,
Synopsys .lib, LEF, DEF, SPF, SPEF, SDC, SPICE, and GDSII. Set them up
right, and these formats provide the interfaces required for tapeout.
The most important unsupported format is PDEF3, but your web site provides
a PDEF3 translator implemented in Scheme at
http://www.deepchip.com/downloads/PhysOptAvanti.zip.
The PDEF3 translator worked great for me on a recent tapeout using Synopsys
PhysOpt with Avanti Apollo.
If you need more data from Milkyway, you can extract it using Scheme. When
someone needed a PDEF3 translator, they just wrote one. I see no
unsurmountable problems here.
- John McGehee
Voom, Inc.
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