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Venice, Florida — Pyxis Technology, Inc. and Silicon Canvas, Inc announced today the first multi-vendor solution to use the OpenAccess Run-Time-Model (OA-RTM) to enable the simultaneous execution of two commercial tools within the same Unix process.
Until now, this type of tight integration was only available for proprietary tools from a single vendor. Figure 1 shows the architecture of the integrated Unix process. According to Richard Morse, Director of Marketing at Silicon Canvas, the integration was achieved without the need to include EDA developers from either company in the process. Laker reads the design information from *.def and *.lef files and generates on a mass storage device the OA Depository containing the design data. As both Laker and NexusRoute execute they generate and use a Run-Time Model of the data base in central memory, thus benefiting from the efficiency of execution provided by avoiding the latency of disk access. This, of course, has been a feature found in the Magma design flow for some years.
1. Laker and NexusRoute benefit from both the Tcl execution environment and the in memory design data.
A design is loaded and the user can move throughout the design hierarchy making design changes and then incrementally re-routing the design. Because the two tools are literally sharing the same in-memory structures in the same process, all changes made by one tool are instantly recognized by the other tool. As Richard Morse, Director of Marketing at Silicon Canvas, pointed out, such architecture allows designers to implement design changes following a route function without the need to regenerate the design data, an operation required in other tool flows.
Pyxis and Silicon Canvas are demonstrating the integration to a live audience at the 12th annual OpenAccess Conference on April 16th at the Doubletree Hotel, San Jose.
"This is an example of using the full capabilities of OpenAccess to deliver tightly-integrated multi-vendor flows, enabling greater innovation," said Steven Schulz, president and CEO of Si2. "The tools are working seamlessly together as if they were one application. The user literally sees a common environment with multiple engines at his disposal."
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