Analog Rails - Thoughts from a Cad Manager

Last week myself and a senior member of my staff were invited to a hands-on look of Analog Rails. Analog Rails is company whose focus is to "create the best analog and RF environment for the IC circuit designer". The system is built upon Open Access and gives an analog design engineer the complete ability to do both schematic capture, simulation and layout. It nicely automates the more tedious aspects of analog layout while giving the design engineer the complete flexibilty. For example the process of both matching (common-centroid anyone) and wire-widening (based on via size) is done in very automated push button method.

In the last several months Analog Rails have really stepped up the development by starting to integrate with outside tools. For example they now integrated in Veritools into the design framework. This is a big step because it implies that they designed a flexible subsystem which is critical - there is no single solution in IC Design. I would like to see spectre ( -turbo of course ) and calibre integrated but it's not there yet.

Throughout the discussion / demo I began to understand the impact of this. Of course it's built on OA and will nicely integrate with Cadence and many many others, but something more interesting is afoot. This tool represents a clear methodology shift.. ..The demise of the block level analog layout engineer. Why? First as I said earlier, the layout automation piece is very intuitive and friendly. Plus the smaller technology geometries that analog design is pushing into (<90nm) is forcing simulation earlier (using Cadence) to account for device parasitics (LOD). So the analog engineer is already doing a fair amount of the placement and letting the layout guy clean up the work. But this tool is correct by construction and so the layout is clean from the get-go. So involving a layout person to "clean it up" isn't necessary. There will still need to be layout for macro / chip level integration but block level layout could (will) be going the way of hand-LVS.

There are areas which need to be better defined. From a cad managers perspective - I look at flexibility and integration. The flexibility to align the tool to corporate goals and strategy, and the hooks necessary to integrate it into my existing flow, and (perhaps) migration to this tool.

The flexibility of the tool is fundamentally there but needs better definition. For example: If the company has it's own fab, and the strategy is to use its own fab, how will this tool which claims to not need a PDK get the design constraints from my foundry into their system? The converse is also true - I am a fabless company with a strategy to tape-out to the lowest cost foundry - how do I ensure that the constraints from Dongbu will work with my design. The point is while Analog Rails clearly has the framework so support this, they need to have a clear methodology for how to implement design constraints which the customer may use or opt to use the defaults from Analog Rails.

[UPDATE]: I did receive a bunch of documentation on the methodology for creating these techfiles. It is pretty straight forward and not as difficult as I had imagined.

From the integration side it was better defined but still lacks the clarity for migration. Because the tool can work on OA it should "just work". But how does this system work when an existing layout done in Virtuoso or Laker which doesn't or isn't correct by construction adapt itself? We spoke of the "dummy mode" but I think a bit more clarity on this would be helpful. I not sure this is show stopper - because it would depend on the use model. If you define your flow/methodology such that this is the sole block level tool for a project it could work. If you want to do a mix - well that would have to be tested.

Overall I was very impressed. The tool has certainly matured over the last year. It's flexible sub-system and the ability to tie into other tools gives me reason to want to look further at the tool. It will be a real test to see this tool integrate with the work horses of the IC Design tools, and how easy it is to define a methodology around the tool. Again this tool has some really cool technology under the hood and should make for a fun evaluation. My concern (as any cad manager has) is that our designers are going to eat this up and really want it. That's a good problem to have.

iPhone Platform: What We Can Learn From Tap Tap Revenge

In reading this - it makes you consider what happens when having a marketing group becomes less important.... Get your fanatical customers to market your product for you and reward them by giving it to them for free.

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But I think there is something even more important to notice about Tap Tap's success. When Seth Godin released his first marketing book, Permission Marketing, he gave away the first four chapters for free via pdf to over 150,000 people. It generated a lot of buzz about the book and was a big factor in the book's success when it eventually became available in hardback. So when he followed up with Unleashing The Ideavirus, he went one step further. He gave away the entire book for free in pdf (it still is available free). Seth says that over 2mm copies were given away. And yet when the book was published in hardback it went to #5 on Amazon. It was a demonstration of the very tactics Seth was evangelizing in the Ideavirus book. Seth asserted that by giving away your product early to your greatest fans who will do more work and put up with a less than optimal experience, you prime the pump for the mass market. That's because your early fans will spread the ideavirus and market the book for you.

Tapulous did the same thing with Tap Tap Revenge. The game was first made available for the iPhone at the start of this year. But the only people who could play it were people with phones that were jailbroken. So it's audience was small, but fanatical. These were the early iPhone app adopters, the ones who would work harder and put up with a less than optimal experience. But now that everyone can play Tap Tap, the early adopters are telling everyone else how great it is.

[From iPhone Platform: What We Can Learn From Tap Tap Revenge]

Semi IP market grew 8% in 2007

Not exactly a stellar year..

The growth of the worldwide market for semiconductor intellectual property slipped back to a single-digit percentage in 2007, reflecting signs of maturity, less organic growth and more growth by acquisition, according to market research company Gartner.

[From Semi IP market grew 8% in 2007]

Cadence bids to buy Mentor Graphics

Now this is news!! I can't believe it - poor wally!

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. announced it has submitted a proposal to the board of directors of Mentor Graphics Corp. to acquire Mentor Graphics for $16.00 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at $1.6 billion.



[From Cadence bids to buy Mentor Graphics]

DAC 2008 Trip Report

Overview

DAC 2008 was significantly less crowds – unofficially counts were down 46% over last year. However Monday (free day) seemed very crowed. Cadence was not present at this years DAC but they weren’t missed. While there is a lot of negative comments in terms of both the size and value of the conference, from my (Analog) perspective I was very pleasantly surprised. I am very glad I attended and I got a lot more out of it than I was expecting.

There are two key areas I was interested in: Analog/Mixed Signal and IP Qualification/Validation. I saw other interesting things but they would be better addressed by my peers.

Analog Mixed Signal Space

Over the past several years Open Access (OA) has been touted as the new open source database for Cadence.

Background: This database is the replacement to the traditional cdb database and is the only supported database for the Virtuoso(i.e. Analog) and Encounter(i.e. Digital) moving forward in Virtuoso 6.1. The benefits to shifting to this database are numerous - you get to use the latest and greatest tools from Cadence. It works on the flow front to back - In other words both the Analog AND the Digital tools can talk to the same dataset. It's fast and highly scaleble. It also is open source and driven from the Si2organization. Lastly, and perhaps the biggest reason to shift to this is that because the database is open source other tools can talk to the database natively without any data loss. Using traditional tools/databases to work on data you must do a data transfer from one database to another. Cadence has used the cdb database, Synopsys has Milkyway, Magma has Volcano, each of which is proprietary to the parent company. So to translate from one database to another you must go through the traditional transfer mechanisms (LEF/DEF/GDS/EDIF). But doing this you loose all connectivity information between the designers intent (Schematic/Verilog) and the layout (GDS). By using a common database, OA retains that critical information and allows others to manipulate the data.

So why is that important? In short because other tools can now access the data, other tools which can do the same tasks that Virtuoso is doing (schematic capture/layout) can now compete natively using the same database. This gives Cadence some competition and I think we will see the start of the fragmentation of the Analog space. This will include both better tools and cheaper replacements. This is not new however and has been on the horizon for the past 3 years at DAC. This year however we saw real products both from the big players (Synopys-Orion, Magma-Titan) which offered up full replacements to the smaller startups which have very interesting point based technology (AnaGlobe - zero refresh layout, Analog Rails- Connectivity Correct Layout, Helix - Floorplanning).

All of this is being driven from the use of an Open Source Database OA. But we are also seeing significant work and adoption of PDK standardization efforts from the IPL (Interoperable PDK Libraries). The IPL is a coalition of companies (primarily EDA Vendors) which is working to standardize on Process Design Kit Data. This year they were able to bring TSMC on as a primary driver and because of this they were able to demonstrate a full Analog methodology using a TSMC PDK which was not Virtuoso based but behaved virtually identical to the Virtuoso PDK. Further they demonstrated the interoperability of this PDK between several competing solutions for front-end design and layout (Synopsys-Orion, Springsoft-Laker) with tie-ins from other companies for Physical verification (Synopsys-Hercules, Mentor-Calibre).

Again, why is all of this important? Price Leveraging. Cadence is no longer the only analog EDA tool shop in town. By demonstrating that this flow is fundamentally possible using other tools and by adopting some of these components when SMSC is developing a new (90nm) PDK we could use that as a bargaining chip when re-doing licensing deals because we are no longer chained to Cadence. That being said there is an additional effort which would need to be incurred to adopt some of these components (Pycells/IPL CDF's), but at least we saw it's possible.

IP Qualification – Fenix-DA

Over the past year Fenix-DA has really started to evolve into a generic IP Qualification and Validation tool. This year they introduced several new features into their Crossfire product which will drive us to re-look at Crossfire. Specifically they have added a generic IP Qualification Path for macros, Flow based prep work, and a rich API to allow you to bolt on components you may require for your IP Flow. All of these components are necessary when looking at generic macros.

In the past Fenix was focused on Standard Cell Qualification and they provide a rich system for handling this data. Fundamentally Fexix-DA is both a Cadence Connection Parter and is part of the Synopsys Partner Program which gives them access to the underlying database API's. This is important for a number of reasons but fundamentally (which was stated above) we can extract much more information from the database than we can by simply looking at the results of a database operation (streamOut/Verilog out). But within a single tool they can talk to both databases - and they are doing this to ensure consistency between them - hence the validation/qualification piece. They initially focused on Standard Cells which were predicatable (an AND gate function is well understood) but this becomes much more challenging when you look at macros.

Now that they are supporting the QA/Validation of macros the challenge is a bit more generic. True, Crossfire can't do the predictive validation that they do on standard cells but they don't need to. The needs for macros (at least initially) are more generic: pin name direction validation, .lib validation and lef/gds validation are all equally important and time consuming to do by hand. While automating pieces of this are straightforward, they are already are doing this which makes is very compelling.

This year they also have introduced a customizable flow based system which allows you to create custom flows depending on your needs. You would use this flow based approach to help generate the collateral needed prior to the release of IP. For example: I need to stream out of cadence a gds file. Crossfire has the Cadence API under the hood so stream outs are handled simply. A more complicated example would be LVS. Build a customized flow to support both the cdlOut and the StreamOut, run LVS and validate the results.. Pretty awesome indeed.

The last key benefit is that if the Graphical UI flow based approach will not meet your needs they have an open source API (written for Python) which you can directly access. This is the most promising feature because I think of it as an API to the API. Now through a single tool I can directly access all components of an IP block using both the Cadence API and the Synopsys API.

Conclusion

Overall I was very pleased with DAC2008. I was surprised by what I saw and in my opinion we will see a fragmentation followed by a subsequent re-energization of the analog tools market. This will be not only good for EDA and Analog design but should make this a much more interesting environment to work in.