Cooley has a fun article on the latest announcements at ESNUG. One is about how DC Explorer is really a half-hearted attempt to produce something fast that can be used to protect DC’s dominant position against RealTime Designer. Synopsys claims that DC Explorer is 4 times as fast as DC and correlates to within 10%.

As John points out:

“We now have a 4X turbocharger on our Design Compiler donkey cart! Yay!”

The rest of the piece compares DR Explorer to Atrenta’s product SpyGlass Physical and then looks at Syonpsys’s recent cloud computing announcements in the light of Synopsys’s old cloud computing announcements conveniently forgotten.

The customer had a 45nm design and it was big. They had just made an RTL change to a 450K instance block and they couldn’t close timing. Worse, there were just two weeks until tapeout. Oasys was brought in and challenged to close timing on the block. They respun the block from RTL using RealTime Designer. The entire customer team pulled together with support from Oasys AEs. Even at 2am and on weekends the office would still be crowded. The outcome: they succeeded. The design taped-out two weeks later.