FEEDBACK

Vendor makes suggestions for product evaluations.

Dear Editor,

I am writing this letter on behalf of our company, IKOS Systems Inc., to call your attention to claims made in an advertisement appearing in your magazine which are patently false and therefore misleading to the design industry at large. The advertisement in question is from Zycad Corporation, and, in this ad, claims are made that Zycad's Lightspeed acceleration product performs 10x faster than IKOS' equivalent product.

We have pointed this error out to Zycad on numerous occasions, and they refuse to correct the ad. In addition, in other collateral material, such as Zycad's web page, their claims of performance advantage range between 3x and 5x and not the 10x claimed in their advertisement. So, even within their own documentation there is a lack of consistency as to performance advantage claims. None of their performance claims have come by competing fairly in industry standard benchmarking activity, although their involvement has been requested several times over the last two to three years.

IKOS' focus is to provide verification solutions for high-complexity designs, and acceleration is one of several technologies we utilize to meet the challenges of high-complexity design verification. For this reason, we feel the Zycad ad does a poor job at reflecting what IKOS verification solutions offer.

In terms of performance, IKOS prides itself not only in offering the fastest mixed-level simulations solutions on the market, but also by providing integration and support of numerous ASIC vendor certified and sign-off library flows. We don't believe that the Zycad ad addresses either of the issues of ASIC library support or high-performance mixed-level simulation environments.

As members of the EDA industry, the role of vendors as providers of critical enabling technology and design automation solutions should be complemented with responsible, customer-focused, credible market actions, including advertising. Zycad's decision to continue to run the ad in question does not support this role.

Larry Melling
IKOS Systems

To voice an opinion on this or any Integrated System Design article, please e-mail your message to michael@asic.com.

integrated system design  January 1997