- Moves to open formats come only after a public standards body
has made significant progress toward standardizing an open,
well-defined, openly managed format which threatens to undermine
the de-facto, proprietary format.
- The newly "opened" de-facto standards are controlled and distributed
by the owner with little or not public input or control. Their are no
checks
and balances in place to ensure equitable and timely distribution of
updates and clarifications which are always needed as users adopt a
new format or methodology.
- The pricing of the license tends to limit adoption to large
established
companies raising the barrier to entry for new and innovative ideas.
This
is in direct contradiction to the needs of users and the health of
the industry
which is dependent on innovation and growth of start-up companies.
In light of these realities I would like to encourage the groups who are
working
for open, public, well-defined stardards. Their work is critical both to
develop
standards needed for interoperability and to encourage proprietors to
open-up
their de-facto standards.
I would like to personally thank J. Bhasker from Lucent for his tireless
work in
pushing forward the VHDL and now Verilog Synthesis standards and Mark Hahn
from Cadence for doing the same with the Constraints work.
I would also like to thank VI and OVI for their forward thinking support of
these
activities, even when such work did not seem to be in short term interest of
some
of their members.
On a positive note, I would like to strongly encourage the owners of
important
de-facto EDA standard formats to open these up in a proper, controlled
manner
that has maximum benefit for the industry. This is the best way to ensure
the
continued growth of the EDA industry and to ensure the stability needed for
lage electronics companies to feel comfortable in making the large capital
investments necessary for continued growth.
In this regard, the DASC of IEEE is ready and willing to work with companies
who wish to bring formats into the public arena and to assure that it is
done
in a manner to supports their business interests as well as those of the
industry at large.
Victor Berman
DASC Chair
-----Original Message-----
From: Steven Schulz <ses@ti.com>
To: Ed Arthur <Ed_Arthur@prominet.com>
Cc: vlog-synth@eda.org <vlog-synth@eda.org>
Date: Thursday, June 25, 1998 10:01 AM
Subject: Re: Stuff
>Ed,
>
>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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>| Senior Member, Technical Staff | Voice: (972) 480-1662 |
>| Software Engineering Services | FAX: (972) 480-2356 |
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