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Faster CPUs Are Only Part of the Solution for High-End EDA Applications Once again the hardware leads the software. by Scott Metcalf

Today's large-scale EDA applications are placing unprecedented performance demands on the workstations that run them. Now that device sizes have plummeted into the submicron range and gate counts are approaching 10 million transistors on a single chip, traditional 32-bit environments can no longer effectively manage the computational tasks associated with advanced chip designs. According to the conventional wisdom, the solution is straight forward: chip designers need only avail themselves of the new 64-bit hardware platforms arriving on the market--such as Sun Microsystems' UltraSparc or imminent offerings from IBM and HP--and all will be well.

But the conventional wisdom reflects only part of the solution. The fact is, the needed workstation performance depends on more than raw processing speed. Also required are a high bandwidth memory subsystem, a powerful memory system that permits manipulation of extremely large data sets as a single entity, and a true 64-bit operating system. In other words, a complete 64-bit environment is needed.

The reason for this requirement is that the size of a problem a given computer can readily manage is determined not just by CPU horsepower, but also by the amount of real and virtual memory the system can address. Since today's high-end EDA applications require far more data space than the 4.2 gigabytes of memory manageable by a 32-bit operating system, workstations that couple a 64-bit processor with a 32-bit OS fall short of the mark. Such architectures require complex designs to be broken down into smaller design components that can be modeled in the 32-bit address space. These components must then be "stitched" back together and modeled at a macro level. The entire process is time consuming and error prone; hence, it is incapable of meeting chip suppliers' time-to-market needs.

True 64-bit solutions represent the way out of this dilemma. A 64-bit OS, such as HAL's SPARC 64/OS, can manage 18 billion gigabytes of memory--more than enough to run the largest EDA applications. Using software design tools ported to take advantage of a 64-bit operating system, chip developers can map the entire design model into the address space. The results include a greatly simplified design process, reduced design cycles, and dramatically improved speed and accuracy of simulation--all of which translates into faster time-to-market and, ultimately, increased revenues and profitability.

No one, including the industry analysts, doubts that the advent of 64-bit workstations is a good thing. But as several analysts have noted, it's 64-bit operating systems riding atop 64-bit CPUs that are ideally suited to increasingly compute-intensive applications such as EDA. Hence, the EDA user community also needs to keep in mind that only a complete 64-bit environment can provide the tools needed to bring ever more complex chips to an expanding marketplace. *

Scott Metcalf is president of workstation vendor HAL Computer Systems (Campbell, CA), A Fujitsu Company.

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integrated system design  March 1996