( ESNUG 446 Item 11 ) ------------------------------------------- [09/01/05]
Subject: Hey! Magma is Also a Serious Player in the Floorplanning Space!
> I taped out recently I used FE v3.2 for floorplaning, place, clock tree
> and IPO. I used Astro 2003.06 for signal routing and power rail
> analysis. That flow worked well for the design aprox 1M gates as far
> as I handled the design as flat. I like FE since it's very quick. I
> would have used Synopsys PhysOpt for place instead of FE if my design
> had been timing critical.
>
> - from http://www.deepchip.com/gadfly/gad111104.html
From: [ Bender from Futurama ]
Hi, John,
I read your "Cadence Shock and Awe" column. If you publish my letter I must
be anonymous. We use FE, Astro, and Magma here.
Floorplanning is a generic term for a host of planning features including
I/O planning, power planning, megamodule placement and hierarchy planning
(physical partitioning and timing budgeting) along with a solid DRC
capability.
Both Synopsys and Cadence are driving towards a single solution to cover
this full scope, albeit from different backgrounds. The floorplanner should
also fit seamlessly with the place & route flow and ensure full bi-
directionality of data flow for netlist change ECOs and/or floorplan change
ECOs. Along these lines, both Synopsys and Cadence are driving to offer
complete functionality for a fully integrated solution.
FE has come a long way from being only a pure stand-alone SVP tool to doing
more floorplanning tasks like IO planning and power routing. It already had
hierarchy planning features and within the SOC framework it has been
integrated to work with a variety of Cadence back-end products.
Jupiter from Synopsys was the established product in all the floorplanning
tasks I listed above (prior to the advent of hierarchy planning). However,
Jupiter has not scaled very well for hierarchical planning of large designs,
and only recently has Synopsys been able to claim to have a competing
solution in this space.
You need to include Magma's Blast PlanPro product in this discussion also,
as our experience with Blast PlanPro has been very positive. It has all the
key capabilities present in the other two tools, plus some unique benefits
since it is totally integrated with Blast Fusion (which we are using as our
implementation tool).
The advantages of a fully integrated solution (Blast PlanPro <-> Blast Fusion)
are substantial as they share the same user interface, same single language
interface (via TCL), same native functions/algorithms, and use a common
Volcano database. Given the increasing popularity of Blast Fusion as an
implementation tool, I would expect these advantages will quickly force
Blast PlanPro into this discussion.
- [ Bender from Futurama ]
Index
Next->Item
|
|
