( ESNUG 373 Item 4 ) -------------------------------------------- [06/07/01]
Subject: ( ESNUG 372 #13 ) Horse Hockey! Avanti Holds Customers Hostage!
> Lately I have been reading in ESNUG users having trouble interfacing to
> Avanti tools. Interfacing any two tools is difficult, but I do not think
> that interfacing to Avanti is any harder than to other tools. ... The
> PDEF3 translator worked great for me on a recent tapeout using Synopsys
> PhysOpt with Avanti Apollo. ... If you need more data from Milkyway, you
> can extract it using Scheme. When someone needed a PDEF3 translator,
> they just wrote one. I see no unsurmountable problems here.
>
> - John McGehee
> Voom, Inc. Los Altos, CA
From: Dale Lomelino <dale.lomelino@philips.com>
Hi John,
I appreciate McGehee's thoughts, but I believe we have different
perspectives on the subject. My job is NOT to develop flows, but to
tape-out working silicon. Yes, I realize that it is possible to write
Scheme scripts to delve into the Avanti Milkyway database (like *Synopsys*
did with dumpPDEF3.scm, dumpPLIB.scm, and readPDEF3.scm), but my
observation was that Avanti does not actively support "standard" design
formats like LEF/DEF or PDEF.
What caused my original snide comments was that credit for the Scheme
scripts had mistakenly been given to Avanti -- instead of Synopsys. My
point was that Synopsys is making an effort to "play well with other EDA
vendors." I have not seen similar support coming from Avanti.
Here's a simple example. When you look for Avanti functions that support
LEF, you get:
functions "Lef"
auLefIn
#t
This omits the "getClash" commands, which one might have guessed should
have been named "auLefOut". Perhaps the "Clash" predicted in the command
name is the Cadence lawsuit that's in today's news? ;-)
- Dale Lomelino
Philips Semiconductors Cary, NC
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