hi, bluep
I think what you mean is that the best floorplan tools is cadence firstencounter(fe) .
and now m@gm@ is also simple to master and can produce better result.
No, it's not cheap ! People sometime are not reasonable in choosing for their flow. Mostly influenced by their past experience and the convenience of the same vendor suite of design flow.
Magma is good but it basically still be considered a point tool. It requires some more time to ally with other big guy to make a good suite.
hi, all
I think in the p&r tools, now astro and socencounter is just the same capacitance, but socencounter include firstencounter that is the best in floorplan tools. so someone think socencounter is the best p&r, but if we input the reulst from fe to astro or socencounter, we can get the nearly same p&r result.
With good library, M@gm@ can do "everything"
in my case, After 2weeks struggling with the d@mn library, M@gm@ reduced the chip size by 20%, Passed formal check. in terms of timing, M@gm@ beat PC,@stro & S0CEncounter +PK$. I am pretty sure it will close timing for this 400MHz, 180KInst. aggressive RISC cpu design in another 2weeks.
Why the salesman say it's able to do this 8O
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Today, many EDA tool vendors have provided their own RTL-to-GDSII flow:
Synopsys: DC + PC + ApolloII (or Astro)
Cadence: BuildGate + FE + SoC-Encounter
Mentor: ???
Magma: Blast RTL + Blast Fusion
But all of them are "implementation" tool !
You still need some "analysis", .i.e. sign-off tool to verify your job.
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By the way, it seems that you can gain a shorter turn-around time through Magma's flow.
1. m@gm@ support syn0psys .lib.
2. you do gain much in terms of turn around time/timing closure with m@gm@, if you have ENOUGH license.
3. Implementation & verification are different field. RTL2GDS means implementation. actually only one company can cover whole ic design, that is the reason it's stock can go up to $60 then split, and now it's above 30.
4. m@gm@ is kind of buggy, especially for linux platform.