Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Magma plans tools to address complexity challenges

Magma plans tools to address complexity challenges is an intriguing pre-announcement. What will this "thing" be?

There's always tension between wanting a "one-stop-shop" with a highly integrated environment and flow, and wanting "best of breed" tools that produce the best, fastest results. Best of breed usually wins. Getting to an integrated environment? That's what CAD departments are for. ;-)

1 comment:

Sandeep said...

Probably, not entirely correct. Its all in the data abstraction model.
We are conventionally used to granularity at RTL -> Netlist -> CTS -> PostLay -> Route -> GDS2.
Each has a dedicated tool, each has a data structure (internally) optimised for that step.
However, think of a single abstraction model that allows you to switch back and forth seamlessly. This has the advantage that you can do back-annotation effectively (when the inevitable re-spin happens). You can also introduce additional info (like for the much-hyped DFM).
I think the magic is all in the data-structure.. if used properly ;)