CAD software

[ANDERSON.ES at PARC-MAXC.ARPA]

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