padpowell@wateng.UUCP (PAD Powell[Admin]) (07/17/83)
There was a VLSI BOF at the Usenix. About 1 1/2 hours was devoted to the discussion of VLSI design software. The following totally unsubstantiatable rumours and statements were made. These are unsubstantiated because nobody would make them officially, and we all know the reactions of the various Blue Suits to the problems. 1. Bell Labs will never again release any CAD software of any sort for any reason. This is an example of the "Once Burned, Twice Shy" syndrome. 2. The fellows down at MCNC indicated that they would be willing to distribute their tools that they have developed. Copies of the Z paper were made available; further documentation will be posted in either a directory on their machine or in net.sources. General reaction of people at the BOF and of me after reading the paper is that the package is well thought out and very useful. They also described their language (ABCD: A Better Circuit Description), EFG (Editor For Graphics), HIJ, KLM, etc. One of the few examples of humour seen at USENIX. 3. Various people described what their groups were doing. University of Washington is working on DARPA funded project to gather up tools and distribute them to other people. They indicated that there was not much problem gathering, but distribution is a real nightmare. A project funded by Philips in Europe is pounding along, and has some tools available for European Universities. Philips is providing a silicon foundary service for the project. U. of Waterloo is working on the Canadian Microelectronics project, involving the selection of a workstation and developement of CAD tools for the Canadian Universities. This venture also involves Queens, where the VLSIIC people are providing foundary services for University Courses. 4. A general cursing session involving the lack of a standard for mask generation or description. There was an expressed desire for a published CIF or whatever standard. Perhaps we should get an IEEE committee working on this? In addition, there was griping about the lack of conversion programs from CIF to mask generator format. 5. People indicated that they were interested in various types of simulators. General conclusion is that Unix is not a nice environment to run a simulator written in Fortran. Clearly there is a user community here which needs a better fortran under UNIX. Perhaps, now that DEC supports UNIX, it might be possible to "port" their VMS fortran compiler into UNIX. It might (Heaven Forbid) even become the basis for paying money to DEC for a compiler. 6. There was great interest in the transporting of data/programs between various systems. U. Waterloo experience in IBM/UNIX data transfer was recounted; libel laws do not permit expression of the authors views about this experience. It is clear that a UUCP/UUX facility for VMS/UNIX/VM would be really nice, and in fact would be essential. This is really a reinvention of the effort that Bell Labs went through with their Designers's Workbench things, presented at the 1981 Design Automation Conference. 7. It was decided to attempt to rename net.lsi into net.vlsi. This would be done by creating net.vlsi, and terminating net.lsi. Also, people would like to know what happened to fa.vlsi, as nothing has been coming over into usenet lately. It was fun meeting all of you, and I hope we can do this again. Remember, there will be a conference up here in Waterloo in September; details will be posted in net.vlsi Patrick ("Did anybody get any sleep?") Powell