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Engineers dish on EDA tools in annual DAC report

John Cooley's report on the Design Automation Conference compiles EDA reviews and benchmarks from 368 engineers.

By Michael Santarini, Senior Editor -- EDN, 2/11/2005

San Jose—Engineers give rave reviews to SystemC, praise tools from Forte, The MathWorks, Synplicity, and Magma, and benchmark several new offerings from startups such as Apache, Reshape, Sierra Design, Zenasis, and Silicon Canvas in an annual report on the Design Automation Conference published Thursday on DeepChip.com. For the report, John Cooley, moderator of ESNUG (the Email Synopsys User's Group), confirmed the identities of and compiled product reviews and benchmarks from 368 engineers who attended last June's show in San Diego.

Late last year, Cooley extracted most of the DAC 2004 data on EDA's two largest vendors, Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys for presentations at their respective user groups. The report posted yesterday includes that data plus 178 new pages of engineer reviews and benchmarks on the rest of the EDA industry's tool offerings. (The links in this article point directly to the relevant pages of the report.)

The report contains information on design but not verification, as Cooley compiles that information from DVCon, scheduled for later this month.

SystemC rising

In previous years, Cooley has insisted that SystemC would appeal to only a tiny number of chip architects. This year's report serves up crow for Cooley, as respondents reveal that SystemC is becoming a serious methodology, especially in Japan for "quick-to-market consumer-electronics designs."

"No, SystemC synthesis is not mainstream yet (hardly)," Cooley writes in the report. "But it's not pure pie-in-the-sky either. Konnichiwa, Forte!"

Respondent Hiroyasu Hasegawa of HD Lab, Inc., gives Forte Design Systems' Cynthesizer a rave review, saying the tool met his company's criteria for "support of pipelined design, ease in defining/creating interfaces to surrounding blocks, processing speed, and throughput and quality of design."

Mentor's Catapult C also receives a large number of positive responses from survey participants. One anonymous user describes his experience using the tool on a new design: "…to use a British expression, 'it does exactly what it says on the tin.' By this, I mean, it does exactly what it says it does: Translate C to RTL. I have co-simulated the RTL produced and found it matches the C exactly."

While the stepped-up attention may be a boon for companies offering system-level tools, including Forte, Mentor, Celoxica, Synfora, and CoWare, Cooley notes that the majority of respondents favor The MathWork's Matlab and Simulink for algorithm development over CoWare's SPW, which CoWare acquired from Cadence two years ago.

"Suddenly now I understand why Cadence pawned off SPW to CoWare!" Cooley writes in the report. "Matlab and Simulink are everywhere, and hardly anyone talked about SPW."

To be fair, SPW users do step up with compliments: "I am a keen Simulink user, haven't used as much of it lately as I have been using CoWare SPW more recently," writes one respondent, Francis Swarts of Broadcom.

Meanwhile, another respondent says algorithm newcomer Elanix's Systemview tool "absolutely rocks!"

Of all the EDA vendors, Synplicity garners the most praise. Users give Synplify FPGA the nod over Mentor's latest FPGA-synthesis offering, Precision. Meanwhile, other users praise Synplify ASIC over Synopsys' stalwart ASIC-synthesis offering, Design Compiler. Many favor Synplicity's Certify FPGA-to-ASIC partitioning and prototyping tool over Synopsys' Design Compiler FPGA.

But Synplicity's Identify, an RT-level FPGA debugging tool, attracts the strongest respondent praise among Synplicity's tools. "I don't think I'd be overestimating if I said Identify has saved us weeks of debug time," writes Marty Stainbrook of Emulex Corp.

While respondents seem to favor Synplify over Mentor Precision, most say Precision is a vast improvement over Mentor's previous FPGA offering, Leonardo.

Respondents are generally impressed with Magma Design Automation's Blast Fusion RTL to GDSII tool for 130- and 90-nm design. They list weaknesses in the flow but don't converge on one truly sore spot. One user cites Magma's physical-synthesis tool as its weakness, another names its RC extraction and routing as weak points, and yet another complains about a drop-off in support after the licensing agreement is signed.

Respondents also seem to favor Cadence's CeltIC over Synopsys' PrimeTime-SI for signal integrity, despite the most recent market data from Gartner Dataquest suggesting PrimeTime-SI is the market leader.

Cooley notes that while that report includes great response for Sequence's Columbus RC extraction tool, it contains almost no comment on Simplex's Fire&Ice.

Zenasis' ZenTime and ZenCell cell swapping tools, Sierra Design's Pinnacle physical synthesis, FishTail's Focus false path locator, Manhattan Routing's Physical Window physical-design cockpit tools, and analog-synthesis startup Orora Design Technologies receive extensive testing from respondents.

Users also praise TannerEDA's low-priced, custom-layout tools and tiny circuit-characterization-tool vendor Libtech.

Benchmarks

The report also includes a number of benchmarks devised by users.

One respondent's benchmark pits ReShape's pdOptimizer against Cadence's First Encounter floorplanner. Another user benchmarks First Encounter versus startup Silicon Dimensions' Chip2Nite.

Yet another benchmarks Silicon Canvas' Laker versus Cadence's market-leading full-custom-tool Virtuoso, which in addition to Silicon Canvas has new contenders in Paragon SE, Catena SiMetrix, and Pulsic's Lyric. Respondents also review Virtuoso add-ons from BindKey and Accellicon.

Another user does a detailed benchmark comparing Apache Design Solution's Redhawk with Sequence's CoolTime dynamic IR drop tools.

Sequence's PowerTheater also gets the nod over Synopsys' Power Compiler in a respondent benchmark.

One final surprise is how little response the DFM (design for manufacturing) and DFY (design for yield) vendors garner from respondents, Cooley reports. While ChipMD generates some comments, not one respondent comments on PDF Solution's addition of a DFY analysis engine to Magma's Blast Fusion flow, according to Cooley.

DFM and DFY are expected to be the hot topics at this year's Design Automation Conference in Anaheim.