( DAC 01 Item 32 ) --------------------------------------------- [ 7/31/01 ]
Subject: Silicon Valley Research, InternetCAD
OLD, BUT CHEAP: Because SVR got pushed into a distant 3rd place in the P&R
market, SVR has opted to re-invent itself as the cheap-but-it-works
alternative to the much pricier Apollo and Silicon Ensemble tools. But even
here, SVR gets no rest. The ghost of Timerwolf, in the form of InternetCAD,
fiercely fights them for the leftover scraps of P&R market.
"Silicon Valley Research (formerly Silvar Lisco) sells place and
route tools. They say they are a fraction of the price of Avanti or
Cadence tools. They are aimed at mainstream and low end designs.
They let Cadence and Avanti fight for the leading edge stuff.
Bluewave Technologies represents Seiko Instrument and Pulsic. They
have both block level and standard cell place and route software.
They say they have over 3000 seats in Japan. They assume a
hierarchical design; the tool can only do about 10K cells at a time.
InternetCAD.com sells ludicrously cheap tools. They give you a floor
planner, standard cell and gate array placer, and gridless global and
detailed routers for $10K fixed ($20K floating license) per year. The
biggest design they've ever done is 1,000 cells; they're mostly used
for analog/mixed signal stuff. Support is email only. They're not
flying an A.E. to you with those margins."
- John Weiland, Intrinsix
"I have used SVR's GARDS for several designs and have recommended
and/or designed the tool into several physical data flows. The tool
is straight forward to use and does not require any where near the
amount of setup as Apollo or SE flows. Its sweet spot is around
100K - 200K instance blocks. You can probably push it up to the
3M-5M range, but I have generally built these large chips
hierarchially so the top levels were never that large.
It is a timing driver router that support fixed pin targets (great
for both I/O rings and also for use as a macro creation router).
Both the placement engine and the detail router are timing based.
Recently they added a CTS tool to the flow which produced a total of
100 psec of clock skew in silicon on a 1.5 M gate design.
Since GARDS is also available on Linux in addition to the workstation
platforms it make a very nice tool to support as all the scripting and
launch automation can be developed on low cost machines. The low cost
of the tool allows for designers to have access to the licenses in
addition to the APR groups and since their recent pay-per-view
licensing scheme arrangement with EECAD - they play nice with overflow
design work or crash schedules since there is no fixed license count
requirements.
Most of my clients have either SE flows or Apollo flows for major SOC
assembly, but I have been very pleased with the resulting route
density, timing closure, integration of the tool with third party
front ends & analysis tools (Synopsys, Cadence, and Mentor), stability
of the code, and execution speed for use as an IP block APR tool and a
mixed signal logic APR tool. Recently we added the tool to our hard
IP migration flows as the preferred to for block level retargeting.
All in all, it is a good straight forward tool for block APR up to a
couple hundred K gates and for top level assembly mid sized 2M-5M gate
designs that need a timing driven flow."
- Pallab Chatterjee of SiliconMap, LLC.
"While attending the DAC in Las Vegas I noted that SVR had a simply
enormous booth - it appeared to be 50x50 feet and at the going rate of
$3000 for a 10x10 my math tells me that the space alone cost $75,000.
Throw in another $30 K for booth and move-in/move-out and about $10 K
for travel and hotels and you're looking at a bill of $125K minimum.
This is not excessive if you are a Cadence, Avanti or Synopsys, but I
knew that SVR was not exactly printing money so it seemed a bit like
when a pigeon puffs up his chest. Anyway, I checked out their web page
and jumped to their Edgar filings the latest which was released in
Feb 2001 for the end of 2000.
I'm not a financier but my daddy told me to always follow the money.
It don't look good. They were down to $119K in cash at year's end.
(They also show 107K in cash gain based on a "cancellation of
indebtedness").
I then checked some of their press releases and these are pretty puffed
up including the fact that they are getting a 70x50 foot booth at next
year's DAC. (I hope the DAC people get cash in advance!)
- Steve DiBartolomeo, www.artwork.com
"InternetCAD.com has a valuable niche role if they can guarantee DEF/LEF
compatibility with Silicon Ensemble. There's a definite market niche
for interactive DEF viewing/editing capabilities in a decent-but-cheap
tool. It's an unhappy thing to tie up a full SE license for the sake
of manual ECO's! InternetCAD.com's price of US $10K per seat per year
is a very attractive proposition for that purpose alone. And they have
a decent pedigree through their original TimberWolf P&R tool work. But
they do need to step forward to make a formal certification of DEF/LEF
compliance (including specific version of DEF and LEF supported!)"
- Mike Carter of Mosaid Technologies
"InternetCAD's router:
I'm not sure what they showed this year, but last year their router
looked an awful lot like Mentor's AutoCells (now defunct). It was a
channel based maze-router which followed shapes. Compaction was used
on the channels to get back unused tracks. This technique works as
routers go but unfortunately they're not at all area competitive. Also
the cells will have to be optimized for the router to garner better
area (i.e. a standard cell library built for Cadence SE will give you
sub-optimal results with InternetCAD's router.) Of course, this has
to be weighed against the fact that it's cheap...!!"
- Tom David of Cygnal
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