Towards the Holy Grail of Interoperability Demonstrating the power of technology & standards ...
November 5, 2007
The live demonstration, in front of an audience of 100 attendees, took a very simple analog circuit – an input differential stage – and showed a number of manipulations on the data. The Pcells were resized using handles and moved around in the RDE Framework from Silicon Navigator. An n-well was inserted between two PFETS in Laker from Silicon Canvas without any intervening steps, except a "save" operation. Finally, the Ciranova viewer invoked Mentor Graphic's Calibre tool and Synopsys' Hercules PVS for DRC operations, and the editors were used to fix some of the layout problems. The demonstration was impressive for two reasons: it worked and it was live. Finally, users of these interoperability technologies are within striking distance of the Holy Grail of seamless data exchange between tools. The only remaining reason for any trace of skepticism on the part of user would be the nature of the design – it was so small that the save operations were totally unnoticed in the demonstration. At this level of design complexity, you could almost do the layout in PowerPoint. However, the demonstration did effectively showcase the interoperability of the IPL and OA across the various tools. The ongoing efforts to improve interoperability across tools and companies have resulted in an interesting situation in the industry. At this point, data exchange across tools from different companies may actually be better than the data exchange across the tool offerings from a single company. The demonstration on October 25th showed the power of relevant and useful technologies – and standards – to improve tool interoperability. ******************************** EDA industry observer Tets Maniwa can be reached at maniwa_at_sbcglobal.net
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