De Geus said it took Synopsys two and a half years of “full focus effort” in 2004, 2003 and half of 2002 to get all its tools correlated.
Concerning the measurable benefits, de Geus said: “I’m pushing like mad on our company that we must move from measuring individual tools to measuring the whole thing and for the first time, this spring, we have been able to show significant improvement, not yet on the entire flow, but on big pieces.”
He pointed to presentations from five customers at this year’s Design Automation Conference, which said they had achieved ten per cent better performance, and 40 per cent better time to results on one “big piece”, an integrated process flow tool called IC Compiler.
De Geus added: “Every three to six months we will see overall significant improvements.”
De Geus sees the progression from point tools to integrated design flows as a natural evolution as design becomes more complex.
“The nature of advanced design is that the constraints all conflict with each other and finding the optimal requires the tight integration of many steps. This is the whole next generation of EDA,” he said.
Asked if this meant the end of point tool developers, de Geus replied: “There will be some point tools that can be plugged into an environment that will enhance some aspect. So people who do have a great idea can plug in
