Designer criticizes tool vendors at awards ceremony

Designer criticizes tool vendors at awards ceremony
LOS ANGELES — The EDA Consortium's 2000 Design Achievement awards were sparked with controversy Monday (June 5) when an award recipient blasted major EDA tool vendors for products that have not kept pace with advanced circuit and system design.

Vinod Menon, director of network product development at Advanced Micro Devices Inc., whose team received EDAC's silver award and $5,000 for its SwitchIT F12M multi-port Ethernet controller, told the crowd, "There is still a lot of room for the EDA vendor community to make sure that we do not have to wrestle with designs."

Menon said the team that designed the SwitchIT design "used practically every [EDA] tool available and pushed the envelope on every tool. In fact I am proud to say that we broke every tool," he said.

Menon pleaded with the design community to "make sure that just as we strive to develop advanced integrated products to meet tight time-to-market deadlines, you need to make sure the software tools are in the same league as the products we produce."

Art deGeus, vice chairman of EDAC and chairman and chief executive officer of Synopsys Inc., offered a tongue-in-cheek response: "We have great respect for people who have broken our tools," deGeus said, and added that it was time to for the EDA industry to do an informercial.

But Menon's comment was not forgotten. In an interview with EE Times after the ceremony, Menon explained how inadequate tools hampered the efforts of AMD's design team.

In each phase of the design, Menon said his team came up with "phantom errors and artifacts from the tools," and there was "coupling between signals that the tools could not detect.

"The tools could not handle the size of the design," Menon said. "This cut away from our productivity because we were chasing artifacts on tools versus problems on our design."

The four major EDA tool vendors — Cadence Design Systems Inc., Synopsys Inc., Avanti Corp., and Mentor Graphics Corp. "have a long way to go on synthesis and other tools" that can support such advanced designs, Menon said.

Only weeks before tape-out, Menon said, the AMD team was saved by Silicon Perspectives Corp. (Santa Clara,Calif.), a provider of front-end physical design tools for deep-submicron system-on-chip designs.

"Within half an hour we got indication whether the design was okay and it allowed us to move to the next phase of the design," Menon said.

Given the stature of the "big four" EDA companies, Menon said, "it behooves them to push the envelope for us."

Despite the tool problems, Menon's seven-person team went from concept to production-mask release in 17 months on the design, which Menon compared to a sixth-generation microprocessor.

EDAC's gold award and $20,000 went to Motorola's iDEN Subscriber Group in Plantation, Fla., for its i1000plus multi-communication phone. The phone design is a digital wireless, two-way radio with text messaging, paging and Internet browser features.

Bill Werner, Motorola corporate vice president and general manager of the company's iDEN Subscriber Group, said the phone design was completed 8-to-10 months ahead of schedule thanks to the EDA tools used by the design team.

Tony Rodriguez, a member of the 10-person design team, said the team found alternate uses for Cadence's Bones tool to help them reach their design goal. The tool is designed to model protocols and networks, but Rodriguez said his team used it for resource modeling. The tool modeled the thermal characteristics of a power amplifier, and modeled a CPU as though it were the server. This allowed the team to measure the performance of the CPU to see if enough Mips were available to support the code in real-time.

The two teams were honored for outstanding circuit and system design, and for their use of EDA tools.

A panel of judges, led by Dave Hodges of the University of California at Berkeley, evaluated the designs.