"This boils down to Hercules vs. Calibre, because Cadence is simply not a factor in this space any more," explained Terry Lowe of IBM. "Unless you are working with small blocks, the only serious contenders are Hercules and Calibre."

"Calibre and Hercules are ahead. I think Calibre is still the best," wrote Philippe Duquennois of Philips. "Dracula is history and Assura is still having problems."

"Calibre is great. Dracula/Diva are dead. Assura hasn't got the foundry support," wrote another engineer.

"The Cadence products are not really in the game," added Pallab Chatterjee of SiliconMap. "From a hierarchical design point of view, they really cannot compete in performance on a big SoC. The Assura product is being pushed into the IP and analog creation space, but the fab support is slow so it's not a big player."

See www.deepchip.com/items/snug03-20.html for users' complete comments.

So I was surprised when I saw Cadence and Mentor tied for first place, at 38 percent each, in the 2001 Gartner Dataquest DRC market share numbers. How could this be when so many users had such a low opinion of the Cadence DRC tools?

"Those Cadence DRC numbers are b.s. because Cadence hasn't had any new DRC sales in that time.

It's all those old, three-year FAM license deals that Cadence did in '98," replied Gary Smith, chief EDA analyst at Gartner Dataquest. "This is just license renewals with their prices raised. In some cases it was a 3x raise."

So pretty much, Cadence is running on fumes in DRC now.

John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a contract ASIC designer and loves hearing from engineers at jcooley@TheWorld.com or (508) 429-4357.