( ESNUG 571 Item 2 ) -------------------------------------------- [04/21/17]
Subject: Anirudh's 19 jabs at Joe Sawicki's Calibre with his Pegasus launch
Calibre Pattern Matching replaces text-based design rules with visual
geometry capture and compare. A visual approach significantly cuts
rule deck size and complexity. It completes against Cadence Pattern
Analysis, Synopsys IC Validator, Anchor D2DB-PM. It kicks ass on
regular SRAM elements, and for curved structures like analog, RF, and
MEMS. Now has Auto-Waivers for visual DRC checks to save time. Also
quickly locates & removes design patterns that are "yield detractors".
Aimed at 10/7nm designs. Samsung, eSilicon, GlobalFoundries, SMIC.
(booth 949) Ask for Jonathan Muirhead. Freebie: cellphone charger
Calibre nmDRC does 10 B devices full reticle 10nm designs in 9.6 hours
overnight. Triple patterning, Self-Aligned Double Patterning (SADP),
hot spot pattern matching detection, voltage aware spacing. It's the
Golden 10nm DRC/LVS sign-off at Samsung, TSMC, GlobalFoundries, UMC.
(booth 949) Ask for John Ferguson. Freebie: cellphone charger
Calibre RealTime lets engineers do instantaneous sign-off DRC checks
during digital PnR inside ICC/ICC2, Innovus, Nitro-SoC, Atoptech.
"Same deck, same results as batch Calibre." Double/triple patterning,
pattern matching, voltage-aware DRC, density checks. 16/14/10/7nm.
(booth 949) Ask for Srinivas Velivala. Freebie: cellphone charger
Virtuoso IPVS is on-the-fly signoff DRC checks as you custom design.
It does DPT odd loop detection with fixing hints for designers in
16/14/10/7nm FinFET/FD-SOI flows. Annotation Browser cross probing.
Renesas, Cortina, ST uses IPVS. Only instantaneous DRC in Virtuoso.
NEW! -- Cadence Innovus-PVS does signoff DRC/LVS, Programmable ERC
(PERC), full metal fill integrated in Innovus, DFM fill, full multi-
patterning color decompositions. Tight integration with Virtuoso
(IPVS). Certified at TSMC/GlobalFoundries/UMC/Intel 64nm to 7nm.
Innovus-PVS track based fill used in production at 16/14/10nm!
Claims to have 5-10x faster ECO fill, 4-5x faster full chip fill.
(booth 107) Ask for Manoj Chacko. Freebie: Denali party tix
- from Cooley's Cheesy Must See List for DAC 2016
From: [ John Cooley of DeepChip.com ]
Last week I openly whined about having to fly 3,132 miles (one way) just to
witness some vague "big announcement" that Anirudh was going to make at his
CDNlive'17 keynote address. Rather than share my initial reaction, I'll
share what the engineer sitting next to me in the audience said:
"Well, it's not every day that you get to see two normally friendly
neighbors, who've gotten along very nicely for the past 20 years,
suddenly break out into a MTV Celebrity Deathmatch."
That engineer was right. In digital PnR, Anirudh's Innovus has successfully
taken marketshare away from Aart's ICC2 fiasco -- especially in the sub-28nm
FinFET nodes -- so it was only a matter of time before Anirudh would make a
play on Sawicki's Calibre DRC/LVS empire.
And this Pearl Harbor timing was perfect. Right when MENT is going through
the shock of being acquired by Siemens, CDNS launches Pegasus. Ouch!
For Anirudh, this is expansion. For Sawicki, this is To The Death.
What follows is what Anirudh (pretty much) said followed by what in my mind
I heard him say.
- John Cooley
DeepChip.com Hollistion, MA
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WHAT ANIRUDH SAID:
"... we are launching Pegasus, a massively parallel DRC engine ...
it's 10 X faster than other DRC tools blah blah ..."
WHAT COOLEY HEARD:
Oh, wow, Anirudh is going after Wally's Calibre... But to be truthful,
Calibre is Joe Sawichi's baby. So Anirudh is going after Sawicki's
bread & butter tool.
Aart tried to take on Calibre waaaay back in the Avanti acquisition days
when he picked up Hercules DRC.
The most Aart ever got in DRC/LVS was ~17% marketshare; Lip-bu's Assura
and PVS only got ~19%, and Sawicki's Calibre dominated at 62% -- and that
was data from 2013! With 16/14/10/7/5nm being ever more DRC/LVS messy,
I'll gladly wager Calibre probably has ~75% DRC/LVS marketshare now.
Anirudh is going after *the* 800 lbs gorilla in DRC/LVS. (that's 1 jab)
Calibre Jab Count: 1 Total Calibre Jab Count: 1
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WHAT ANIRUDH SAID:
"... blah blah past 4 years ... we developed EDA's first fully
distributed massively parallel STA tool (Tempus), same is true for
signoff EMIR (Voltus), synthesis and test (Genus, Modus), and a
world class massively parallel P&R tool (Innovus) blah blah..."
"... blah blah machine learning ... data streaming ... cloud ...
machine learning ... parallel ... LSF compute farm ...
large # of CPUs blah blah ..."
WHAT COOLEY HEARD:
This was Anirudh yelling: "No, Cooley, Pegasus is NOT a wrapper put
around our olde PVS tool -- Pegasus is totally new code we developed
over 4 years from the ground up! It runs on 1 zillion CPU's, and
has clever machine learning stuff that Calibre lacks! Parallel!
Pipelined! And cloud, cloud, cloud!" (that's 7 more jabs)
I know Calibre does multi-CPU, but the impression I got from Anirudh's
tone was this Pegasus launch leapfrogged past Calibre in some way.
Calibre Jab Count: 7 Total Calibre Jab Count: 8
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WHAT ANIRUDH SAID:
"... blah blah 10X better performance ... near-linear scalability
over hundreds of CPUs ... customers run Pegasus on 900 CPUs still
get near-linear scalability blah blah ..."
WHAT COOLEY HEARD:
"Look! My Pegasus runs on 900 CPUs and is still linear! 8X! 12X! 6X
faster!!! And it scales, baby! Give it 3X CPUs and it's 3X faster!"
I did love the Penn & Teller misdirect here. The entire audience is
naturally *thinking* these numbers were against Calibre; but it's not;
Anirudh benchmarked Pegasus vs. Cadence PVS. It's subtle. He never
said Calibre nor PVS. We just filled it in on our own. Clever...
(that's 2 more jabs, faster & scaling, against Calibre)
Calibre Jab Count: 2 Total Calibre Jab Count: 10
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WHAT ANIRUDH SAID:
"... blah Pegasus cloud-ready ... 1000's of CPUs linear scaling
blah blah uses low memory machines ... flexible, elastic architecture
where your DRC runs dynamically grab available machines and start the
job as soon as the first CPU is available."
WHAT COOLEY HEARD:
"Cloud, public or private! Cloud! Cloud! Or your own LSF compute farm
if you want!" (I think Calibre runs only on LSF compute farms, so I'm
only counting this as 2 jabs, not 3 jabs.)
And that "dynamically grabbing CPUs" mention for Pegasus seems new. I
don't think Calibre does that yet. (that's 1 more jab.)
One side topic Anirudh detailed was the cheap engineering costs of using
the cloud for EDA tool runs. Say you have a DRC run which takes 3 hours
on 30 machines on your Amazon AWS cloud account. That costs roughly
$2/hr/machine -- which is only $200 in HW costs for one 3 hour complete
full chip signoff job. If you double your cloud HW investment, then for
just ~$400 ($200 more) you get that same job done in 1.5 hours.
Now it's possible for a design team to budget large DRC runs on the cloud
with cheap on-demand cloud HW. "Is it worth $200 more for this DRC run
to be in 1.5 hours?"
Calibre Jab Count: 3 Total Calibre Jab Count: 13
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WHAT ANIRUDH SAID:
"... blah blah our Pegasus DRC works well in both our Innovus digital
PnR tools plus inside our Virtuoso full custom layout environment..."
WHAT COOLEY HEARD:
What Anirudh said here was inconsequential blather. What his slide said
here spoke volumes. (Zoom in on it.)
In digital PnR, Pegasus is doing signoff DRC, incrental DRCs, signoff
metal fill, incremental metal fill, timing-aware metal fill, and MPT
decomposition for FinFETs -- all inside you Innovus run! (that's 1 jab)
For Virtuoso, Pegasus does on-the-fly DRC and metal fill work -- with NO
memory streaming; and dynamically does object creation/editing/deleting
feeback directly to the user. (that's another jab)
Oh, and Pegasus uses foundry-certified PVS decks, too! That is, you
don't need to chase TSMC/GF/ICF/UMC for Pegasus decks. (another jab)
And Calibre RealTime only works inside Virtuoso, not Innovus. (jab)
Calibre Jab Count: 4 Total Calibre Jab Count: 17
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WHAT ANIRUDH SAID:
"... and we got both Microsemi and TI as actual users of our Pegasus!"
WHAT COOLEY HEARD:
"... and we got both Microsemi and TI as actual users of our Pegasus!
Watch out, Sawicki! A little over 20 years ago YOU stole our Dracula
DRC customers with your Calibre DRC. We're coming to take them back."
(that's 2 jabs from 2 customers bailing on Calibre for Pegasus)
Calibre Jab Count: 2 Total Calibre Jab Count: 19
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On Tuesday of next week, I'll have
A quickie summary of how the Pegasus vs. Calibre war will play out
published. This post and the Innovus announcement just set the stage.
- John Cooley
DeepChip.com Holliston, MA
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Related Articles
Anirudh's 19 jabs at Joe Sawicki's Calibre with his Pegasus launch
Anirudh's 32 jabs at Aart de Geus's ICC/ICC2 on his Pegasus launch
A quickie summary of how the Pegasus vs. Calibre war will play out
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