( SNUG 00 Item 19 ) -------------------------------------------- [ 4/05/00 ]
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM: As a business division, the EPIC part of
Synopsys seems to have pretty good penetration with its tools. You
can see this from the SNUG'00 user tool survey:
Synopsys EPIC PathMill ###### 13%
Synopsys EPIC TimeMill ###### 13%
Synopsys EPIC PowerMill ###### 12%
Synopsys EPIC Arcadia # 3%
Synopsys EPIC RailMill # 2%
Synopsys EPIC CoreMill 1%
Synopsys EPIC ACE ## 5%
Cadence Mixed-Signal Sim ## 5%
Mentor Mach-TA 1%
Mentor AccuSim 1%
The problem is that these customers are really paranoid of each other, so
you can't get a critical mass of them together discussing the tools. Go
snip out the EPIC stuff from the SNUG breakouts:
9:00 - 12:15 (MA3) Tutorial on EPIC Tools & RailMill 14
1:30 - 4:45 (MB4) Tutorial on EPIC, ACE with VCS 17
10:30 - 12:00 (TA4) TimeMill, Synopsys SLE, PathMill 16
1:15 - 2:15 (TB4) EPIC PathMill 71
8:30 - 11:45 (WA4) Tutorial on EPIC PathMill 11
and you see most of the time there are only about 17 users talking EPIC.
"So what?", you may ask? What keeps a tool growing and doing well in the
EDA world is the community of users around that tool. No community, and,
given enough time, the competition will scarf up all those customers.
"I heard that the EPIC part of Synopsys is falling apart; many of
the old EPIC team have left and the remaining ones are unhappy.
Also, customers are drifting off to other tools. What's up here?"
- a Wall Street stock analyst
"We have long complained about the Synopsys-Pathmill correlation
issue. This is mainly a problem with setup and hold time calculation
at latch nodes by Pathmill. If there are finite (i.e. slow) transition
times on the clock signals (transistor gates) controlling a latch node,
the analysis is inaccurate. Where Synopsys synthesis libraries are
derived from SPICE characterizations, any EPIC Pathmill runs on
post-synthesis netlists have an ugly tendency not to correlate well
with reports from Design Compiler. We have been pretty frustrated that
EPIC (now call "Nanometer Analysis Technology" inside of Synopsys) has
not resolved this, since they agreed that it was indeed a problem.
With both Pathmill and DC now in the same company, it is even more of a
question. After Aart's bold statement, I have to ask, is this an
issue at any other design houses?"
- Chip Laub of Intel from ESNUG 348 #7
|
|
