That other Avanti issue

That other Avanti issue
In the EDA world, Avanti is known for two things. One is for legal action-both criminal charges and civil lawsuits. The other is for selling some damn good place and route (P&R) tools. No, I take back that latter assessment. The way I figure it, because the cost of switching P&R tools is so high and because customers fear being sucked into a Cadence/Avanti lawsuit, Avanti's tools must be the best in their class. Otherwise, no one would have risked buying them.

But now, with the physical synthesis wars bringing more ASIC designers into the P&R realm, the P&R veterans are warning us newbies about another Avanti issue. "Avanti actively works to keep you locked in via their proprietary interfaces," wrote Dan Moritz of LSI Logic in ESNUG 368. Dan wrote in because in ESNUG 367, an anonymous engineer had sent a set of Scheme scripts that translated PhysOpt PDEF 3.0 to and from Avanti PDEF 2.0-and I had then asked users to start writing about Avanti issues.

LSI's Avanti story is pretty ugly. Dan's project was interested in getting DCL/OLA IEEE 1481 support. Basically, LSI is an Avanti house, and Dan wanted Avanti to support some of the agreed-upon industry timing and data exchange formats, like OLA, DCL, SPEF and more PDEF. Avanti gave LSI the classic, "We don't have enough engineers to do that now" excuse. LSI countered by actually offering to lend Avanti an engineer from LSI to do the work at and for Avanti. And Avanti declined LSI's offer!

"I am thinking about all the resources they have wasted as a result," Dan wrote. "We have them working on tons of correlation issues, like every other EDA vendor that buys their tools. The reason we and several other major silicon suppliers want EDA vendors to incorporate the rest of 1481 is to eliminate this useless effort. A refusal of charity indicates not only a penny-foolish but a pound-foolish business strategy."

In the end, Dan's group at LSI created its own infrastructure around the Avanti MilkyWay database that allows LSI to get OLA sign-off without Avanti's timing engine.

"LSI is now a little bit smarter as a result," wrote Dan. "We list OLA support in our new EDA contracts to eliminate this kind of unreasonable behavior."

Dan's experience isn't unique. "Just don't heap too much praise upon Avanti until you get to know them," warned Dale Lomelino of Philips Semiconductors. "If anything, they have more warts and blemishes than Synopsys and Cadence combined. Avanti does not want to support standard formats like PDEF or LEF/DEF. Instead, they prefer to lock you into their 'unified binary MilkyWay database'-and hold you hostage."

What good is a best-in-class P&R tool if you can't interface to it?

John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a Contract Asic Designer and loves hearing from engineers at jcooley@world.std.com or (508) 429-4357.