In my judgement, yes. There were many complicating factors associated
with the 2-year-old "donation", most of which are no longer viewed as a
concern. However, as one who was intimately involved in the process, I
can state that at no time did I ever see a semantic definition to accompany
the syntax. Having unambiguous semantic definition is of paramount
importance to achieving true interoperability for synthesis and verification
flows. Your example on inferencing is a perfect scenario that validates the
need for your group.
Regards,
Steve Schulz
At 10:35 PM 6/24/98, Ed Arthur wrote:
>
>
>
>Hi,
>
>Firstly, it was nice seeing everyone at the face to face last week.
>The rest of you, get moving! :-)
>
>The headline article in this weeks "EE Times" is "EDA integration
>finally gets real - Cadence and Synopsys open tool chains". The
>article states "...Synopsys offered to license its synthesis constraints
>..." and "two years ago, Synopsys offered its RTL (register-transfer
>level) synthesis-language subset to the EDA Industry Council".
>
>If the RTL subset is still "up for grabs" does our group have any
>purpose? I realize we weren't concerning ourselves with constraints
>but it seems like trying to budge the de facto standard is intractable.
>
>Anyhow assuming we still have a purpose, one of the problems I've
>seen with Synopsys (at multiple design teams at different companies)
>was with the inference of MUXes. An example from a recent ASIC
>had an 8-1 Mux which wasn't inferred. Synopsys broke it down to
>(mostly) 2-input gates many levels deep. We never got it to
>converge so that module ended up with hand instantiation of the entire
>datapath and control.
>
>A pragma like "// synthesis mux-recommended" so the tool starts
>with a mux implementation or even holds until overridden is what
>I'm requesting here.
>
>Thanks,
>/Ed
>
>PS: I hope this is the purpose of the list!
>---
>Edward S. Arthur Enterprise Infrastructure Products Group
>Data Networking Systems Lucent Technologies
>400 Nickerson Road Marlboro, MA 01752
>(508) 303-8885 x217 earthur@lucent.com
>
Regards,
Steve
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| Steven E. Schulz, P.E. | Internet: ses@ti.com |
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