Cadence to challenge Mentor's Calibre, again
By Michael Santarini, Senior Editor -- EDN, June 20, 2005
After losing market-share dominance in DRC/LVS (design rule checking, layout versus schematic) for digital design to first Avanti and more recently Mentor Graphics, Cadence Design Systems is preparing to make yet another run at the market, EDN has learned.
At a morning breakfast at the Design Automation Conference last week, Cadence officials said the company will release a new DRC/LVS tool at its "CDNLive!" event later this summer. Cadence quietly acquired the DRC/LVS technology last year from a Beijing, China-based EDA startup called eTop Design Automation, EDN has learned.Cadence was not obligated to announce that acquisition because the eTop acquisition price was an immaterial amount.
Cadence officials are remaining tight-lipped about the DRC/LVS tool, which is part of the company's "Torino project," but Cadence CEO Mike Fister told breakfast attendees the technology will be released in September. "It wouldn't be unexpected to find it changes the process we've used for the last 10 years," Fister said at the event.
However, Joe Sawicki, Mentor Graphics' executive vice president and general manager of the company's design to silicon division, said Mentor's Calibre has already bumped up against the new Cadence tool in a Japanese sales engagement. The "Torino" tool proved "3x slower and not getting stunning results," Sawicki said. Meanwhile, Synopsys officials said that eTop had been shopping the tool around for a while and Synopsys passed on acquiring it; instead, Synopsys is months away from releasing a faster version of its Hercules tool, improved solely from internal R&D.
Starting in the early 1980s, Cadence owned the DRC/LVS tool space in both analog and digital design. As design moved into the deep-submicron era, however, the design files became too large and the company's tool too slow. Thus, for roughly a two-year period, Avanti's Hercules, with hierarchical design features, took the lead from Cadence's Dracula. Mentor then introduced its own speedy, hierarchical tool called Calibre, which has since become the market leader.
Since losing its market lead in the late 1990s, Cadence has diligently tried to reclaim the lead in the digital DRC/LVS space, but has yet to introduce a product that delivers a convincing enough improvement for users to consider dropping Calibre. Cadence introduced, Dracula, and then after starting to lose market share, introduced a succession of DRC/LVS tools including DIVA, Vampire, Assura, and Chameleon that failed to slow Calibre's market position in the digital physical verification arena.
Indeed, every major EDA company—the most visible of late being Magma—is trying to unseat Mentor in DRC/LVS because that tool niche carries one of the highest price points in EDA and has room to grow, especially in the analog realm, which today, largely due to its relatively small database requirements, is still dominated by Dracula. DRC/LVS is also strategically important, as it is the main jumping off point in the design-for-manufacturing arena. DRC/LVS tools check that GDSII files meet manufacturing and design requirements before they get handed off to manufacturing.
The space is deemed so critical that last year Magma Design Automation purchased DRC/LVS startup Mojave Design before Mojave had even hired a marketing department that could introduce the company to the market. Still, Mojave was EDA's worst-kept secret and was heavily hyped in the EDA angel investment circle as a "Calibre killer."
The way to kill Calibre, according to Magma, Cadence, and Synopsys, is to beat its speed by offering tools that verify larger files faster than Calibre.
Mentor's Sawicki said he doesn't feel threatened by Cadence's move. A number of benchmarks exist, he said, most notably one on Deepchip.com comparing Calibre to Magma's tool.
"The bottom line is, ask physical-verification engineers if they are having problems with Calibre," Sawicki said. "The answer is 'no.'"
That said, Mentor isn't sitting on its laurels and is constantly adding new functionality and speed upgrades to Calibre.
Sawicki announced at a DAC dinner that an upcoming version, for example, will have litho-friendly features, pinching and bridging, and links to metrology tools.
