( DAC 00 Item 30 ) --------------------------------------------- [ 7/13/00 ]
Subject: Avanti -- Life in the Forbidden City
LIFE IN THE FORBIDDEN CITY: Doing business with Avanti is very much like
doing business within the Forbidden City of old Peking, China. The all
powerful emperor lived there with his entourage of eunuch-administrators.
If you knew the right people and played your cards right, you were rewarded
handsomely. But if you didn't know the right people, the guards wouldn't
let you, a common peasant, within the walls of Forbidden City. Try calling
Avanti today and ask for someone by a specific job function (say, like for
Customer Support in Apollo.) The phone receptionist/guard will ask if you
have a specific name, and if not, will tell you to talk to your local Avanti
sales representative. (If you had phoned Cadence/Mentor/Synopsys and tried
this, they'd yawn and immediately connect you to their respective hotlines.)
Why does Avanti operate this way? Because Emperor Gerry doesn't believe in
having a listing of Avanti employees by job function. And nobody disagrees
with the Emperor and lives to talk about it.
Paranoid corporate cultures aside, as I said before, if you play your cards
right, you'll be rewarded handsomely. In this case, there's a goldmine of
hot backend technology awaiting the peasant savvy enough to charm his way
through the all walls Avanti bureaucratic maze.
In the physical synthesis market, Avanti's Saturn tool has been in the
business for a little over two years now (since May 1998). Saturn reads in
a Verilog netlist and does a netlist optimization by resizing buffers/gates,
plus it restructures logic (i.e. resynthesizes logic), and does a full
detailed placement in preparation for Apollo II's layout to meet timing.
Saturn can also do a lot of post-Apollo II optimizations, too. (And to be
fair, it could be argued that Cadence's QPopt inside of the Cadence Qplace
tool from the same timeframe is equivalent to Avanti's Saturn in many ways.)
Saturn's frontend Avanti younger brother (Dec 1999) is a product called
Jupiter. Jupiter reads in Verilog/VHDL RTL, analyzes it with the Avanti
Nova (interHDL) capabilities, and then lets you do hierachy manipulation,
design planning and timing budgeting as the user. When you're ready, it
then spits out Synopsys constraints & custom wire load models to drive
Synopsys Design Compiler based on actual routed interconnect numbers. After
you're done with DC, you read the results back into Jupiter and then you can
do some (not all) of the Saturn optimization tricks to get fully placed
design ready for Apollo II layout.
Yes, the two tools do overlap quite a bit. Saturn is meant to be mostly a
backend guy's tool while Jupiter is a frontend man's tool. This year, the
Avanti eunuchs claim that they've added clock tree synthesis, scan chain
insertion, and the ability to handle L-shaped blocks during design planning
to Jupiter plus Saturn supposedly now runs 10X faster than before.
As an FYI, from the recent SNUG'00 customer survey, between 6 and 18 percent
(accounting for the survey's margin of error) of Synopsys users also use
Saturn. According to Gary Smith of Dataquest the true number is probably
much closer to the 6 percent than the 18 percent because most of those who
have Saturn got it accidently as part of a bundled Apollo II package. Gary
has no numbers for Jupiter but warned that it wasn't accepted by customers
initially because it had been marketed using Avanti's ACEO synthesis (which
was crap) and had just been recently repositioned as a DC-oriented tool in
hopes of getting customers.
On the P&R front, the Avanti eunuchs are proud to brag about the technology
improvements in Apollo II. The biggie is that they've added a new delay
calculation algorithm inside of Apollo II. For example, in Cadence Silicon
Ensemble if you want to do a detailed delay calculation (i.e. with 5 percent
of HSPICE) you would have to 1) write out your design's database, 2) do a
full paracitic extraction using Frequency's or Ultima's or even Cadence's
own extraction tool, 3) read in the SPF into a timing analyzer like Cadence
Pearl or Synopsys TimeMill to get detailed path delays, 4) re-annotate the
data back into Silicon Ensemble. In contrast, Avanti claims that Apollo II
can now do this all automatically. They also claim to have automatic
antenna checking, power & ground slotting, and metal filing. Also, Saturn
and their Mars X-talk tool are now fully integrated within Apollo II.
Mars X-talk is also supposed to do "pruning" such that it throws out
aggressor nets that aren't active.
In addition, the Avanti eunuchs are bragging about two new products:
Starsim-XT (which is supposed to be a 3rd generation of the old Anagram
that can now handle 100 million transistors plus parasitics with a supposed
accuracy of 1 to 4 percent of HSPICE) and "Cosmos" (a tool for the full
custom market that's very similar to Cadence's Virtuoso but accesses the
proprietary Avanti Milkway database.)
Check out the other physical oriented parts of this report for more Avanti
technology. Avanti has a lot. They just don't know how to market it well.
"For biggest lie, an Avanti guy said that nobody is using SE anymore.
The UI may suck and the underlying code be from 1983, but SE still
can give better results. And as far as I can tell, there is no
knowledgable Avanti support in Austin."
- an anon engineer
"Avanti's Jupiter is not a synthesis tool as I learnt on DAC but
creates more accurate constraints for DC instead. Better than using
wireload models which is a big problem we are encountering right now
(by the way, there are more such tools like TeraSystems or Aristo).
But the most interesting for RTL synthesis for me is Magma."
- an anon engineer
"Avanti claims Jupiter is being used by several customers and has
recently been incorporated into the design-tool flow of several major
ASIC vendors, including Motorola."
- Michael Santarini of EE Times
"The big difference is that Avanti actually has most of the tools you
need to actually finish a design and doesn't have to bolt in every
tool in the universe to a generic "Framework" that doesn't buy you
anything. (I still don't buy the synthesis inside the Place and Route
world though. Still need the links to Synopsys!)"
- anon engineer
"Avanti: as usual think they can continue co-existing with Synopsys help.
That's about to change. Crappy support with extremely buggy tool and
no version control in place - its lucky for the Avanti guys that Cadence
is even worse..."
- anon engineer
"John,
I enjoyed your article on Avanti's Gerry Hsu; it was true and funny @
the same time. I couldn't agree more, as a user of their software
since the ArcSys days and a Cadence user before that. Gerry did a
great job of integrating Cell3 and Cell Ensemble. However I believe
there's a method to his madness as he does treat AEs badly and R&D guys
very well. (I heard of large cash incentives.) If Avanti is
hemorrhaging AE's, it's only good for the company in that these AE's go
out and get real jobs (with much better pay) what software do you think
they will bring in house? Also, their tools are well integrated (what
better way to sell more tools.) Star-RCXT, for example, is far more
accurate than anything else out there.
I don't know if I go as far as thanking GOD for Gerry Hsu, but I would
say, as a user, my life is easy with them, than without them."
- Scott Clapper of Chameleon Systems ( ESNUG 351 #9 )
"Cadence vs. Avanti? No brainer, Apollo has been great for us. We use
other Avanti backend tools and they work well in our environment."
- an anon engineer
"Avanti was the only company that tried to look better by distributing
their percentages amongst the different disciplines such that they
added up to 125 percent.
Well, maybe it was another Avanti bug..."
- an anon engineer describing the "Design Closure: Hope or Hype"
panel held on Tuesday 2:00 - 4:00
|
|
