( DAC 99 Item 29 ) ----------------------------------------------- [6/25/99]

    "Cadence's Distributed Synthesis (Ambit PKS/Envisia) :

     They showed 2-3x improvement for designs using 5 CPUs.  The steps the
     tool followed were

           1) partition
           2) budget and create jobs
           3) submit the jobs to a queue for execution
           4) reassemble

     The user simply adds resource information to their script and adds the
     '-distributed' flag when optimizing:

                         do_optimize -distributed

     The tool had some useful graphical displays which the designer could
     use to analyze the distribution of jobs and adjust for the next run.
     Each CPU requires a full synthesis license.  The QOR (Quality of
     Results) will be the same for any distributed optimization (no matter
     how many CPUs were used) because the jobs would be set up the same.
     However, the QoR was different than a single CPU optimization.
     Compared to a single CPU, distributed optimization often had designs
     that had 2-3% slower clock."

         - an anon engineer