an asic vs fpga
Hi Raghu,
Structured ASICS:
Structured ASICs is the @ltera concept to rapidly fabricate the designs and give the chips early to see how the designs are working on silicon(normally fabricating initial ASIC prototypes is very time consuming. ).hardcopy series are Structures ASICs from @ltera which have the bottom metal layers fixed and only the top layers can be designed by the customer.
"What would be the Best tools for ASIC's STA, Power analysis, and other backend floorplanning, p&r,etc"
Lot of parameters are there to figure out the best tools. Customers usually select the tools based upon their applications.
for STA PrimeTime(Synopsys) is the golden sign-off tool.Other tools like Astro(Synopsys) for P&R,Voltage Storm(Cadence) for Power analysis calibre(Mentor) for physical verification are popular.
Apart from this Magma has Blast Create and Blast Fusion which has different engines sitting on the same bed to enable an integrated flow from RTL to GDSII.but Magma is widely used to do P&R.
Regards