( ESNUG 253 Item 2 ) -------------------------------------------- [10/4/96]
From: "Jim Dean" <jimdean@bnr.ca>
Subject: I Really Like Nextwave's Spread Simulator Called Epilog
Hello John,
I manage the simulation group at Northern Telecom. I am writing to say
that I find your ESNUG reports to be very informative (as well
as entertaining) and I would like to add my bit to help fellow users.
I've found Verilog-compatible spread simulator called Epilog, from
Nextwave Design Automation in San Jose to be very useful. I love this
tool, and have purchased several copies. Epilog is not your average
min-max simulator: it uses probabilistic distributions over the min-max
range to describe what the delay is likely to be for each component,
and when it "adds" delays up, it truncates the tails, which are unlikely
to happen. This eliminates many of the unlikely hazards which would
reported by traditional min-max methods. We have used this tool both
in board and in ASIC simulations, and feel that it has saved us an
iteration per ASIC. (The problem being that as we go further and further
sub-micron, delay across a single die is less and less correlated - so
we have to do margin analysis on ASIC's.) I felt so strongly about
this tool that I helped fund Synopsys/Logic Modelling's effort to put a
SmartModels interface in place so that Epilog had access to timing
info in SmartModels.
- Jim Dean
Northern Telecom Ltd
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