( ESNUG 262 Item 6 ) -------------------------------------------- [5/29/97]
Subject: Cooley's Mistaken Conjecture That Synopsys Used Synplicity On ARKOS
> ACCIDENTAL ENDORSEMENT OF SYNPLICITY: On the Friday at the end of SNUG,
> the ARKOS group within Synopsys took 20 customers on a "school trip" to
> go see the actual manufacturing of the ARKOS boxes. (One of the guys in
> our group saw the ARKOS box for the first time and described it as "it
> looked like an old 50's vintage Philips refridgerator painted blue with
> a Pratt & Whitney turbofan jet-engine cooling system installed on top".)
> Once we got to see the actual PCBs used to make the ARKOS box, I laughed
> out loud. Why? Because I saw 5 QuickLogic FPGAs on that PCB. Synopsys
> doesn't have QuickLogic synthesis libraries (because QuickLogic is such a
> small FPGA vendor.) There's really only one company that has QuickLogic
> synthesis libraries: Synplicity, an FPGA synthesis rival of Synopsys,
> which means Synopsys had to use Synplicity to build ARKOS! :^)
From: sgolson@trilobyte.com (Steve Golson)
Probably not. QuickLogic does have a Synopsys library (I wrote the
first release of it for them several years ago) and it was recently
greatly improved with some assistance from Kurt Baty. In fact, three
QuickLogic employees (Venkatesh Nathamuni, Atul Ahuja, Chris Chow) were
given the "SVP Team Play Award" this quarter for their development of
DesignWare components for the QuickLogic synthesis library. (SVP is
Synopsys' Semiconductor Vendor Program.)
- Steve Golson
Trilobyte Systems
From: klein@ATB.Teradyne.COM (Larry Klein)
The bit about Synopsys not having Quicklogic synthesis libraries is not
true, and has not been true for more than 4 years. I bought and still
use, now in version 2.0, the Quicklogic Synopsys libraries, and they
work quite well. We have done more than 20 FPGA designs using it over
the years.
In fact, the shortcomings of Synplicity (it has problems with latches
and FF's using both the set and reset pins) has made it mandatory to
use Synopsys over Synplicity for most of our designs....
- Larry Klein
Teradyne
From: Nelson_Willhite@BayNetworks.COM (Nelson Willhite)
John...
I worked with QuickLogic on a large FPGA project last year, and we used
Synopsys Design Compiler to synthesize the VHDL-based design to
QuickLogic's library. The library was developed internally by QuickLogic
and was very immature, ie it didn't account properly for cell input
capacitance, etc. when mapping - it was logic mapping only. I spoke
briefly with the QuickLogic Engineer who developed the libarary (I was
teaching him a lot). Bottom line... there is a Synopsys library for
QuickLogic parts available - I've used it.
- Nelson Willhite
Bay Networks
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