Editorial

Sturm und Drang in the EDA Industry EDA vendors are always looking for better ways to serve their customers. Here's one way they can achieve that noble goal. By Lindsey Vereen

Sometimes it seems as if EDA vendors are their own worst enemies. To begin with, their reputation has long been a problem. They are no strangers to the term "used car dealer." The EDA tools they sell are expensive, complex, and not entirely bug free. Users are obliged to understand these tools as fully as they can. They must judge their capabilities against a variety of needs in order to select the best ones to get their jobs done.

When you get right down to it, it's a time-to-market issue. The better the tools fit design engineers' needs, the easier it will be for them to get their own products out the door. Consequently, almost all users demand that tool vendors do benchmarks for them, which translates into an enormously high cost of sale for the vendor.

One way to reduce the time and effort put into tool benchmarking is through independent product evaluations. While such evaluations don't eliminate benchmarking entirely, they can help limit and focus the task, which, according to one simulator vendor, reduces the cost of sale.

Here's where vendors seem to work against their own best interests. Some of them are reluctant to allow objective information about their products to get out into the marketplace, so they stonewall public evaluations. You may have seen--or signed--restrictive licensing agreements that explicitly forbid the disclosure of benchmark results.

By opposing independent evaluations, vendors force users into these elaborate and expensive benchmarking efforts. As Dave Kohlmeier of Data I/O commented, "users won't buy without evaluating. They've been burned too many times." When vendors refuse to submit their tools to credible, independent evaluations, they imply that they prefer to control the information their customers receive about the tools. Caveat emptor seems to be their motto.

ASIC & EDA with the help of Seva Technologies published simulator evaluations last year at absolutely no cost to participating tool vendors. Integrated System Design continues to maintain this tradition. Last month we published an evaluation of seven workstation-based Verilog simulators. Every vendor was invited to participate. Not everyone did so. We have also invited every appropriate vendor to participate in the evaluation of VHDL simulators we will publish in June.

The participating tool vendors are to be commended because they clearly are putting the interests of their customers at the forefront. Consider the vendors whose tools are being evaluated. They provided materials and application support to the evaluators with no assurance of how their tools would fare. These vendors deserve your consideration when you are looking for tools because they are the ones who understand that they must serve their customers' needs.

Fortunately, even vendors who refuse to participate in evaluations cannot escape scrutiny, thanks to the Internet. Look for help in such news groups as comp.lang.vhdl, comp.lang.verilog, comp.sys.mentor, comp.cad.cadence, comp.arch.fpga, and (occasionally) comp.cad.synthesis. In addition you can sometimes find independent users' groups such as John Cooley's Synopsys .com/isdweb/&lf=isd-sendtolog"> Synopsys users' group called ESNUG. These organizations provide a tremendous service to users by disclosing bugs and work-arounds, and generally providing reality therapy. Vendors would do well to browse the news groups, too. It could help remind them where their best interests lie.

Lindsey Vereen is editor-in-chief of Integrated System Design.

integrated system design  April 1995