( DAC 01 Item 33 ) --------------------------------------------- [ 7/31/01 ]
Subject: Calibre, Hercules, Cadence DRC/LVS, Avanti Cosmos, K2, Assura
EDUCATING JESS: Last Friday, Jessica Kourakos of Goldman Sachs asked me to
explain why Mentor's Calibre sales were down 10%. As I do with all the Wall
Street people who call me, I warned her that I don't know fiscals, but I do
know technology. And that sometimes the most revealing information is
discovered accidentally. In this case, I told her: "From what I'm seeing,
Mentor's Calibre still rules the roost in the DRC/LVS market. Just look at
what customers used for DRC/LVS in the Magma tape-outs in ESNUG 374 #7."
"Our major partner, STmicro, performs our LVS/DRC backend tasks. I
believe they use a combination of Hercules, Excalibre and Apollo."
- Morrie Berglas, PowerVR Technologies, from ESNUG 374 #7
"We used Calibre for physical verification on all of these designs."
- John Dyer, QThink, from ESNUG 374 #7
"We used Mentor Calibre for physical verification."
- Hung Hua, Signet Design, from ESNUG 374 #7
"With TI, they run LVS/DRC for us using their own internal tool. With
VLSI, we used to run XCalibre/Calibre. Now with Philips, they run
Hercules for us."
- Hans-Olov Eriksson, Ericsson Radio, from ESNUG 374 #7
"For LVS/DRC, we mainly use Mentor."
- Hiroaki Maruyama, NEC, from ESNUG 374 #7
"For sign-off, we used Simplex for extraction, PrimeTime, and Calibre."
- Marco Montalti, STMicroelectronics, from ESNUG 374 #7
"Hercules was used for our tapeout, mainly for logistical reasons.
However since then I have purchased Calibre."
- Paul Pontin, 3Dlabs, from ESNUG 374 #7
"Dracula, Diva, and Assura are not keeping up. They're stumbling.
Calibre is still the way to go. One measure is the availability of
tech files from fabs. If I'm going to use Dracula/Diva/Assura, you
don't find them. You do find tech files for Calibre."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Calibre seems the best, but not necessarily hugely better than
Hercules. Dracula has been dead meat for years.
Runset development and validation is in some ways more critical than
the tool per se. I've found bugs in officially-released-and-blessed
runsets from foundries, some as blatant as failing to catch vias with
no metal over them. RAMs often require special checking for the
bitcell. PLLs and other analog blocks often pull stupid tricks like
using NWell or poly resistors that can screw up DRC and LVS checks.
ERC checks often need to be coded from scratch because they're not
provided. Getting all this right is a significant amount of work.
The lawsuit hasn't affected purchases so far, but may soon."
- Howard Landman, Vitesse Semiconductor
"Avanti Cosmos needs a lot of work to be competitor to VCD from
Cadence Virtuoso.
Assura comes now with a very comprehensive user interface that has
almost everything a user need to solve errors in DRC and LVS. If the
running performance is competitive to Calibre and Hercules than maybe
we have a winner!!!"
- Dan Clein, PMC-Sierra
"We actually used the Magma tools for DRC and LVS. During our original
eval of BlastFusion we had carried out a very careful correlation of
the physical verification results of Magma DRC with Cadence's Dracula.
After we worked through some minor mismatches, we were satisfied that
Magma's DRC was equivalent to Cadence Dracula."
- Gerry Atterbury, Fujitsu Microelectronics, from ESNUG 374 #7
"We used Avanti Hercules for verification."
- from "Sun Glasses At Night" in ESNUG 374 #7
"DRC, ERC, LVS
I will list Avanti first so as not to get any Avanti A.E.s ticked at
me. I saw their demo of Venus, which is still in beta. They say it is
2X faster than their current Hercules tool, uses less memory and can
operate both hierarchically and incrementally. For DRCs, the chip is
sliced and different slices can be sent to different processors to
speed the DRC, but you'll need a license for each processor. DRCs can
be incremental, either by layer or by cell, which is a big time
savings. They say their incremental LVS is also a big time saver. It
also has a "short finder" GUI to help you find where two nets are
shorted. As for antenna checks, their new Astro router does antenna
detection and repair at the block level, then Venus checks the top
level. I didn't get to check out similar tools from Mentor or Cadence
so I don't know what they have cooking.
Cadence's Assura is supposedly a combination of the Clover tool they
got from Lucent and their existing Vampire tool. I didn't get to see
it. Nor did I see anything from Mentor. I've heard that Lucent/Agere
doesn't even use Clover any more; they switched to Avanti years ago.
Still, I've heard good things about the tool.
DSM Technologies sells a tool that takes design rules graphically
and then automatically generates DRC/LVS decks for Dracula, Hercules
and 3 other tools. They claim their decks are within 10% of the
efficiency of decks written by an expert in the tool. They also
generate transistor level design kits automatically."
- John Weiland, Intrinsix
"The Avanti lawsuit does give me the creeps. I used Avanti tools for
hierarchical DRC/LVS back when the only other option was Cadence
Dracula. Today, I'd rather use the latest hierarchical DRC/LVS
from Cadence."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"My 1st task in [ my company ] was to evaluate Calibre vs Assura.
Calibre beats Assura in almost any aspect. We are using Calibre for
few months and we are satisfied from our decision."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"Based on past experience, I'm not eager to try any Mentor tools. Based
on my experience, Hercules runs much better than Cadence's DRACULA or
VAMPIRE. Keep Virtuoso. Even with our purchasing Avanti's Enterprise,
I'll be keeping at least one LTL license for as long as I can."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"K2 Technologies
Their product is called Chameleon and it does DRC, LVS, and Parasitic
Extraction. The technology supposedly evolved out of TI a long time
ago. It's similar to Caliber and Hercules. When we asked as to what
made their tool interesting, the guy looked at us like we were strange.
(OK, we found the tool boring too, but we expected him to show some
enthusiasm.)
When we insisted he tell us something that differentiated his tool, he
said the rules language could be more intuitive and that the cost was
lower than Hercules. They are not doing hierarchical design but do up
to 80 million transistors (a Sun design) flat. It runs on Solaris and
they are working on Linux. They used 2GB of virtual memory for the
Sparc microprocessor."
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
"We re-verify that with our signoff (TI internal/K2) layout
verification flow."
- Francis Larochelle, TI ASIC, from ESNUG 374 #7
"Custom Layout:
Bindkey Technology sells a tool that straps onto Cadence's Virtuoso
layout editor. It understands your DRC rules and can either warn you
every time you've violated one or prevent you from violating them
(your choice). They are alpha testing a tool to fix DRC errors."
- John Weiland, Intrinsix
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