'Real' designers reject Windows NT

The Windows NT juggernaut has slowed in the EDA community. Chip designers say the Windows NT operating system doesn't offer significant advantages, and that it has serious reliability and networking problems.

While adoption of Windows NT is widespread for FPGA and pc-board design, there is strong resistance in the ASIC and custom IC design arenas. As a result, around 90 percent of EDA software revenues are still Unix-based, according to the Electronic Design Automation Consortium (EDAC) Market Statistics Survey. The latest survey, however, showed an uptick in Windows-based license revenues in the second quarter of 1998.

Many designers say that lower hardware costs don't matter, given the cost of EDA software for synthesis, simulation and IC layout. Some who are concerned about hardware costs have become vocal advocates for the open-source Linux operating system.

It's not that Windows NT is not growing: NT-based EDA revenues grew by 92 percent last year, according to Gary Smith, analyst at Dataquest Inc. (San Jose, Calif.). "The problem is that it doesn't look like it's going to make it up into the power-user category," said Smith.

FPGA design is nearly all Windows NT, and pc-board design mostly so, noted Smith. But chip designers, he said, are likely to need a 64-bit operating system before Microsoft can provide one. As a result, Smith has downgraded his Windows NT forecast from 32.9 percent of EDA revenues by 2001 to 27.7 percent.

Analyst Ron Collett, president of Collett International (Santa Clara, Calif.), remains bullish on Windows NT and doesn't think there's been a slowdown. But, he noted, EDA software has to be available on the NT platform, and the operating system has to reach "at least parity" with Unix in terms of robustness.

"And that's been a big challenge," Collett said. "Many customers say it has not been quite stable enough."

Looking for reasons
Ask a chip designer about moving from Unix to NT, and you're likely to hear some variation of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." That's the way Anders Nordstrom, senior ASIC designer at Nortel Networks (Ottawa), sees it.

"If I have something that works, why replace it with something somebody claims is equally good? I don't see any reason to risk it," said Nordstrom. And he suspects Windows NT is not equal to Unix. "We have a very large network, and if it goes down for an hour, 500 designers can't work. We need serious reliability and I don't think NT has it."

Moving would not be easy. "We have thousands of lines of scripts and an enormous user knowledge built on Unix, and it's too expensive to throw that away," said Nordstrom.

Lower hardware costs are not much of an enticement for Nordstrom, especially since the prices big EDA vendors are charging for Windows NT software match those for Unix. "Even if we got the workstation for free," he noted, "a Synopsys license is $150,000. So that's no reason to move."

Mike Murray, CAE manager at Acuson Corp. (Mountain View, Calif.) is also unconvinced, even though his corporate IT department is trying to standardize on NT. "I don't see any compelling reason to move to NT at this time," he said. "I don't know that I believe PCs offer a lower cost of ownership. There are a lot of things in Unix that seem to work just right."

Murray is interested in low-cost hardware, but what he'd really like to see is Solaris running on a Merced platform. He thinks that will be an "easier step" for the EDA vendors than Linux support.

Cost of ownership is an important factor, too. "By the time you factor in the system administration work that's necessary, I think the number of Unix machines per support person is higher than the number of PCs per support person. That makes the Unix platform to be lower cost overall."

The support issue was also raised by Steven Swift, senior staff engineer at Fluke Corp. (Everett, Wash.), who uses Linux in his design work whenever possible. "At Fluke we spend about five times as much per Microsoft seat as for Unix seats in support costs," he said.

"While I don't ever use NT, I see notices at least once a week warning of system down time," Swift said. "Our Unix systems and our bootleg Linux systems rarely go down — running for months without a single glitch."

Networking support, particularly the ability to launch and control jobs across a large network, has been cited as a weak spot for NT by many designers. In a recent Crosstalk letter in EE Times, Jim Kleckner, formerly chief technical officer of Cats Software Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.), cited several key NT shortcomings — lack of a remote log-in service such as the Unix "rlogin," different choices of drive letters for file systems, a "registry" that makes it difficult to maintain a log-in profile, and the lack of an ability to change a user ID and pose as someone else.

One large company that has evaluated Windows NT, but so far decided not to use it for chip design, is Texas Instruments Inc. Steve Schulz, senior member of technical staff for TI's advanced ASIC architecture team, said that support and stability emerged as two large concerns during these evaluations.

"The biggest problem was the support," said Schulz. "When there was a problem on the Unix side, it was very easy for our Unix gurus to diagnose the problem. Once we contacted our suppliers, we got very quick turnaround. But with our evaluations on the NT side, problems were very difficult to identify."

The difficulty, said Schulz, is that suppliers of applications, OSes, drivers and hardware cards were not in a position to take overall responsibility.

Reliability was another concern. "We've had our share of NT lockups or crashes in the office-automation world," Schulz said, "so our engineers around here have yet to have a very positive experience."

TI's evaluation was held two years ago, at a time when few chip-design applications were available on Windows NT. Now there are more applications, and Schulz noted that Synopsys' recent announcement of NT support is a big step forward. But, he said, TI still needs a "compelling event" before a migration to Windows NT is likely.

Vendors take stock
In the face of user resistance, large EDA vendors are taking a more realistic look at Windows NT. "Cadence has heard loud and clear from our IC customers not to change our Unix focus," said Phil Laidlaw, manager for platform marketing at Cadence Design Systems Inc. (San Jose). "Chip companies still have a huge investment in Unix infrastructure."

Mentor Graphics Corp. (Wilsonville, Ore.) recently inked a strategic partnership for Windows NT support with Compaq. But Kurt Melanson, strategic applications manager at Mentor, acknowledged that his company has "not seen much movement" in ASIC and IC design towards Windows NT.

Synopsys (Mountain View, Calif.) just started shipping most of its Windows-NT products in September. "We haven't seen a massive migration in the last month, although a few seats within a large account may have been introduced," said Joe Laird, platforms marketing manager at Synopsys.

EDA vendors such as Model Technology, Exemplar Logic and Synplicity, however, do believe that a Unix-to-NT migration is under way. In some cases, this is regional — Exemplar, for instance, is seeing a rapid movement to PCs in Japan.

One large electronics manufacturer that is strongly embracing Windows NT for its internal EDA work is Compaq Computer (Houston). Wendy Stresau, manager of Compaq's corporate design-automation group, said the company is hoping to run all of its EDA applications on NT by 2000, and is presently migrating synthesis from Unix to NT.

"It wasn't just a decision that we should use Compaq hardware," Stresau said. "About a year ago, we saw that we had to expand our current compute environment. When we came out with the [Compaq] Professional Workstation series, we saw we could get performance comparable to Sun workstations for a lot less cost."

Stresau said Compaq has found ways to get around the migration issues that have troubled other companies. This has been accomplished partly through third-party products, such as Auspex file servers for NFS file sharing, Platform Computing's LSF utility for load sharing across a network and Vector Networks' PC Duo product for remote log-in.

"NT is not as reliable as Unix, and it does crash more," Stresau said. But part of the reason, she said, is that designers are trying to run jobs on their desktop that should be parceled out to a network. With a large "compute farm," Stresau said, NT crashes can be greatly reduced.

Intel Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.) is also aggressively moving towards Windows NT in its chip-design environment, and is using Xeon-based workstations offering 400-MHz performance. "We see a much higher price-to-performance advantage with the IA [Intel] platform, and we feel we are going to see improved productivity," said Greg Spirakis, general manager for design technology at Intel.

So far, he said, Intel has primarily moved its internal chip-design tools to Windows NT. The company hopes to have a complete suite of tools on NT by the end of next year.

Spirakis said Intel designers have experienced "some difficulty" in moving scripts, but said that Windows NT should require less need for scripting. "We will admit we have seen some of the same reliability issues others have seen, but we do expect it to improve with the next release of NT," he added.

Given the huge chips that Intel is designing, there are some applications that will need 64-bit support, Spirakis said. These represent a minority of applications, and Intel will "more than likely" keep them on Unix for some time, he said.

The Linux alternative
Stresau and Spirakis both noted that there is interest among some Compaq and Intel engineers for Linux, an increasingly popular open-source version of Unix that runs on PC hardware. Linux has become a hot topic in EDA recently, and has many passionate advocates who frequent Internet news groups and other public forums.

From the EDA-vendor perspective, however, there are two problems with Linux. One is that most of the interest is coming from rank-and-file engineers, not the managers who sign purchase orders. Secondly, there's a support issue. "The costs of supporting a new binary are enormous, and the volumes need to be there to make the change attractive to EDA companies," said Cadence's Laidlaw.

Nonetheless, an increasing number of EDA vendors are taking a second look at Linux. "We are keeping an eye on Linux, particularly as it relates to mixed-environment computing," said Mentor's Melanson.

Avant! Corp. is porting its Verilog Polaris simulator to Linux. Design Accelerations' SignalScan debugging environment now supports Linux, and Novas Software is considering Linux for its debugging software. Quickturn Design Systems has customers running its SpeedSim cycle-based simulator on Linux compute farms.