( ESNUG 364 Item 5 ) --------------------------------------------- [02/01/01]
Subject: Mentor Renoir vs. Innoveda's Visual HDL with ALDEC & ClearCase
> My design group is considering purchasing one of the two tools in the
> subject line (Mentor Renoir vs. Innoveda's Visual HDL). If you have
> experience with _both_ of them, please let me know your thoughts on the
> relative strengths/weaknesses of the two.
>
> - Eric Holbrook
> Agere
From: "Roger Boyer" <rlboyer2@home.com>
I don't know if this continues to be the case, but when I used VisualHDL to
tie together text based blocks (created as HDL rather than their state
machines, etc) it wasn't able to do the one thing this sort of tool should
be able to do - it couldn't manage propagating signal name changes through
the various levels of hierarchy. My feeling was that if I had to do this
by hand, why use the tool at all?
Things to consider:
- I was using VHDL, the Verilog support might be different (but I doubt
it, if they could solve this in one language but not the other then
you have other things to worry about.)
- I was using this on a Sun work station
- This was about 3 years ago (you might ask if this has been changed or
fixed.)
Renoir? Never used it, I'd like to know if it's any good myself!
- Roger Boyer
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From: "Dean Susnow" <susnow@home.com>
I have used Renoir on the last 2 large ASIC designs. The tool is powerful
and very easy to use. We evaluated both tools 2 years ago and decided to
purchase Renoir. We have been very happy with our decision. Mentor
Graphics is very receptive to customer feedback and incorporates requests
in future product releases.
- Dean Susnow
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From: "Roger Boyer" <rlboyer2@home.com>
One issue that I rarely see handled well in "code generation" tools is
configuration management. Perhaps I make a bigger deal of this than others
becuase I come from more of a SW background your typical HDL coder, but when
integration time hits "hot & heavy" there is a premium on being able to
reproduce a given version with a high degree of certainty. Most of these
types of tools don't interact well with CM tools such as ClearCase.
Does anyone have any good or bad experiences with this? In my opinion, this
is as important a feature other "usability" issues.
- Roger Boyer
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From: "Markus Meng" <meng.engineering@bluewin.ch>
That's one view, however you could also give ALDEC a try. You get most out
of the money. In Renoir, what I hated most in the projects done so far, is
the somewhat not so easy to use component mechanism. The differentiation
between a component and a cell doesn't make to much sense to me.
Another annoyance in Renoir is that you can't display concurrent FSM on one
sheet. You will get several sheets. That's something really bad, where you
can easily loose the overall view of the design.
In general Renoir is not a 'just do it tool' it is sometimes a little bit
complicated. Especially the printing and signal naming mechanism on the
sheet's you are working on is sometimes messy.
- Markus Meng
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> One issue that I rarely see handled well in "code generation" tools is
> configuration management. Perhaps I make a bigger deal of this than
> others because I come from more of a SW background your typical HDL coder,
> but when integration time hits "hot & heavy" there is a premium on being
> able to reproduce a given version with a high degree of certainty. Most
> of these types of tools don't interact well w/ CM tools such as ClearCase.
From: kenkovaa@gamma.hut.fi (Kim Gunnar Enkovaara)
This has been the problem with many tools. Fortunately Renoir 2000 has many
fixes in the version management side and supports directly many version
management packages (CC for example). The support is better than in 99.x
packages.
- Kim Enkovaara
Helsinki University of Technology
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