stehle.tsca%sri-tsca@sri-unix.UUCP (02/25/84)
We are actively looking for a CAD system that will assist us in doing electronic circuit design and documentation. We need all or part of the following CAD: Schematic capture, editing, & plotting Printed Circuit design (including auto place & route) VLSI circuit design Wire list generation Timing simulation Mechanical Drafting Color VUgraph generation with text and graphs. We are looking for anything that might be available, whether free or for sale. Since we have several systems running UNIX, it is the preferred operating system for the software. However, if you know of a system or software package unique to some specific hardware, I would appreciate hearing your comments. I have seen the May 83 list of VLSI tools generated by Willie Lim. I am not on this bboard, so I would appreciate it if replies would be sent directly to me. I will compile any responses received and submit them to the bboard. Thanks, Roy Stehle SRI International Menlo Park, CA 94025 Stehle@SRI-TSC
ANDERSON.ES@PARC-MAXC.ARPA (02/28/84)
Roy, I am also actively looking for a CAD system to purchase this year. We already have 2 Calma GDSII Chips Systems which are running 4 color graphics edit stations on each one. Each system is a Data General Eclipse S/230 32 bit mini-computer running RDOS. We use it for VLSI chip design, layout, editing, plots (Versatec 8272A 72" raster electrostatic plotter and a Color Versatec raster plotter on order), DRC's, sizing, fracturing, and documentation. These systems run about $1 Million each. We want to add to our Lab 2 engineering workstations that at the very least can handle complex VLSI designs and do the same jobs as above plus be Calma compatible. We would also like to be able to do Schematic capture, editing, & plotting, Printed Circuit design (including auto place & route), Wire list generation, and Timing simulation but these are not mandatory. It would mainly be used to offload our Calma and would be used by circuit design engineers who are not familiar with the Calma. For this reason, we would like it to be fairly easy and quick to learn. We are budgeted at about $400,000.00 total for both workstations. We have already benchmarked VIA Systems (about $94,000.00 for a basic system) and weren't very satisfied with them (we had a demo system set up in our lab for 5 weeks). We have also tentatively ruled out on paper Daisy, Mentor, and Valid due to their shortcomings. We are scheduled to benchmark a Metheus system in our lab in April. Metheus runs about $75,000.00 for a basic system. This system looks very promising in the demo we saw. It runs Berkeley UNIX, has brilliant high resolution color graphics, supports Ethernet, has circuit design, layout, DRC, editing, logic-level timing simulator, SPICE, and verifies logical netlist-to-physical layout consistency. I would appreciate any information you have already collected on the systems you've already looked at or are thinking of looking at. Also, if you'd like any additional information from me, just let me know. Good luck. Craig Anderson VLSI CAD Supervisor Xerox Corp. 701 S. Aviation Blvd., A1-28 El Segundo, Ca. 90245 213-536-7299