( DAC 99 Item 12 ) ----------------------------------------------- [6/25/99]

    "Physical Verification and Optical Proximity Correction (OPC):

     The big news on this front was the almost non-existent position of
     Dracula and the other tools by Cadence in a prominent role.  Avanti
     rolled out Hercules II which is a faster hierarchical checker with
     enhanced flat mode checking.  They are now claiming that their flat
     and mixed mode checking for LVS is almost as good as Calibre.  EPIC
     Synopsys announced Cedar last month.  ( http://www.epic.com )

     The technology and integration leader at this years DAC for physical
     verification was Mentor's Calibre.  They have finally taken a lead
     position in the marketplace and should not face any major competitors
     for dealing with large designs (over 500K devices) mixed hierarchy
     and mixed design methodology devices for the next 3-4 years.  They
     have a number of nice integration issues with the product that make
     it very attractive -- including a standardized verification language
     that extends to PDR verbiage as well as verification code.  This
     standard language is Mentor product independent -- that is their old
     tools, current tools, and new tools will read the same decks so there
     is no legacy data problem on old tech files.  Additionally, they have
     run-time optimization of the run decks, which allows for multiple
     styles of run set development to still result in high performance
     verification runs.  Politically, Mentor had some major coups -- they
     attracted several very high up technical people from the Avanti
     Hercules program to aid the propagation of the Calibre program.
     ( http://www.mentorg.com )

     Avanti has now _linked_ their DRC/LVS tools to some of the old TMA
     process development to make a pseudo-suite for OPC.  The tools have a
     high degree of technical merit -- however they are not integrated
     together well as yet and their support for the area is weak.  Mentor,
     through the acquisition of OPC technologies has developed a very
     viable and usable OPC solution.  They integrated the product around
     the Calibre engine and created a GUI based tool for doing OPC runset
     generation which is very easy for the process development people to
     use.  The runtime performance and data handling capabilities,
     including new 64 bit fast viewers for the large databases, seem to
     easily handle 1999 and 2000 OPC solutions.  The MicroUnity and
     Numerical Technologies folks have very high end technical OPC products
     that are not really usable in a production environment.  Their run
     times are long, they produce only flat OPC data rather than
     hierarchical which creates huge (>2GB) data files that cannot as a
     result be viewed by current layout editors in any sort of convenient
     fashion.  (Virtuoso under 950x and IC442 has a 32bit address or 2GB
     max file/data size limit).  These products also do not really have a
     maintainable runset structure that would allow for limited manpower
     to maintain multiple process flows."  ( http://www.numeritech.com )

         - an anon engineer