( ESNUG 426 Item 7 ) -------------------------------------------- [03/31/04]
Subject: Three More Letters On Mentor/Exemplar/Leonardo/Precision
> Scenario 1: Wally's Revenge
>
> Synplicity was founded by ex-Mentor synthesis gurus Ken McElvain and Andy
> Dauman. For Wally Rhines, the CEO of Mentor, it's a wee bit embarrassing
> to have his ex-employees best him in a market that Mentor used to own.
> If it turns out that Synplicity sales really did drop 31% while Mentor
> sales remained steady in FPGA synthesis, Wally gets to laugh as he watches
> Bernie Aronson, the CEO of Synplicity, do his best imitation of the
> Help-I've-Fallen-And-I-Can't-Get-Up lady. Sweet, sweet revenge....
>
> - from http://www.deepchip.com/gadfly/gad031204.html
From: [ An Anon Engineer ]
Hi John,
Please keep my response anonymous.
We have used both Synplify and Leonardo for several years. We have added
Precision RTL/Physical to our tool suite, and going forward we will no
longer offer Leonardo to the engineers. A version of Leonardo will be kept
around for legacy (old) designs.
We have used Precision RTL to get around a problem in Synplify. Most
recently, Synplify Pro kept merging I/O FFs with internal FFs to save
space, which ruined our I/O timing. Precision RTL handled the FFs
correctly.
Unfortunately, Precision RTL created an EDIF file with a bus notation of ()
and that doesn't match with the [] bus notation used in the Xilinx .ucf
file.
Synplify Pro still has significantly shorter run times. Final results
from the tools are comparable. Based on the relative costs of the
tools, we will be cutting back on Synplify Pro licenses and increasing
the number of Precision RTL licenses. No interest in the latest FPGA
synthesis offering from Synopsys. Precision Physical looks very promising,
but we haven't tried it on a production design yet.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: Alain Giraudat <alain.giraudat=user domain=fr.thalesgroup spot balm>
Hi, John,
We have been succesfully using Leonardo Spectrum Level 3 for many years
with several FPGA technologies. We synthesized a hundred designs each year
using Leonardo. It can be used in a quick and easy press button mode
as well as in an advanced mode. Then many useful options may be used, but
in most cases default options are best choices.
- Alain Giraudat
Thales Systemes Aeroportes SA Elancourt Cedex, France
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
From: Jeff Vetter <JVetter=user domain=cinele spot balm>
Hi John,
We have used Mentor's Leonardo Spectrum as our digital synthesis tool for
at least the last five years. The product has worked well as a synthesis
tool and provides a schematic viewer that has been very useful for
evaluation of critical timing issues. We target mostly Actel and
occasionally Xilinx Virtex type devices.
However, recently we have been evaluating the Synplify synthesis tool
from Synplicity, which has provided significant improvement in device
utilization and timing. I understand synthesis tools tend to leapfrog
each other over the years so we'll most likely maintain tools from both
vendors and use the one that gives us the best results for a particular
design.
Note, Mentor does have a new tool, Precision Synthesis, that we are
planning to evaluate and perhaps this tool will turn out to be more
competitive with Synplify.
- Jeff Vetter
Cinele
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