3 ms·

I'm interested in this field. What are the current pain points with EDA tools? And are we talking device level, process level, circuit level or all levels?

deepnotderp 9y ago
Pretty much everything. There's a landmine of bugs in even the best EDA software. I'd just like for the software to run nicely once, like TensorFlow... sigh. If you're thinking getting into this field, I might suggest a modular software architecture where the non-proprietary parts are open source and everything NDA-sensitive is kept closed source (pretty much anything the foundry touches/provides).
- Tomminn 9y ago
  Super super interesting. So this is the case for the big expensive commercial products like those that come out of shops like Synopsys? It strikes me that helping to improve (device side) EDA is probably a pretty sound investment of my time, since I've got some phys chops and it's pretty important to the global economy.
  - deepnotderp 9y ago
    Oh, believe me, in many ways it's worse with the big expensive tools because those are produced for only a few companies.
- marcofatica 9y ago
  what are some or one of the largest offending bugs or class of bugs?
  - deepnotderp 9y ago
    Compatibility is a huge one. Honestly, if you write a robust HSPICE to ___SPICE (or Xyce) translator, I'll be very grateful. There are other problems too. Just in general, lots of bugs. For example, we'll run something and we'll get an obscure error, and then we'll ask the EDA company, and then two weeks later we'll get a generic "we'll look at it". The hilarious thing is, sometimes the more expensive EDA companies aren't necessarily the better ones, our current partner isn't necessarily known as the most expensive tool suite, but we've actually had (so far at least >.<) had a much better experience with them than the bigger vendors.
    - madnat 9y ago
      Isn't that the problem with whole industry? Every vendor makes it really hard to work with tools from other vendors. Furthermore initiaives like openaccess/accellera acctually seems like they are a paywall to stop others from entering the market. Is your company big? Usually bigger EDA vendors don't care much for smaller design houses. Btw. how are your experiences using Xyce? Do you get much speed up using its parallel processing capabilities?
      - deepnotderp 9y ago
        Our company isn't that big, and that's a fair point, but one of our circuit designers worked at Intel for over decade and reported the same experience. Xyce is new and has some syntax differences, so it's not a mature software quite yet, so there are some troubles there. But as we've been starting to make it work, it's given us some amazing speedups on large clusters.

deepnotderp 9y ago

Pretty much everything. There's a landmine of bugs in even the best EDA software. I'd just like for the software to run nicely once, like TensorFlow... sigh. If you're thinking getting into this field, I might suggest a modular software architecture where the non-proprietary parts are open source and everything NDA-sensitive is kept closed source (pretty much anything the foundry touches/provides).

Tomminn 9y ago
Super super interesting. So this is the case for the big expensive commercial products like those that come out of shops like Synopsys? It strikes me that helping to improve (device side) EDA is probably a pretty sound investment of my time, since I've got some phys chops and it's pretty important to the global economy.
- deepnotderp 9y ago
  Oh, believe me, in many ways it's worse with the big expensive tools because those are produced for only a few companies.
marcofatica 9y ago
what are some or one of the largest offending bugs or class of bugs?
- deepnotderp 9y ago
  Compatibility is a huge one. Honestly, if you write a robust HSPICE to ___SPICE (or Xyce) translator, I'll be very grateful. There are other problems too. Just in general, lots of bugs. For example, we'll run something and we'll get an obscure error, and then we'll ask the EDA company, and then two weeks later we'll get a generic "we'll look at it". The hilarious thing is, sometimes the more expensive EDA companies aren't necessarily the better ones, our current partner isn't necessarily known as the most expensive tool suite, but we've actually had (so far at least >.<) had a much better experience with them than the bigger vendors.
  - madnat 9y ago
    Isn't that the problem with whole industry? Every vendor makes it really hard to work with tools from other vendors. Furthermore initiaives like openaccess/accellera acctually seems like they are a paywall to stop others from entering the market. Is your company big? Usually bigger EDA vendors don't care much for smaller design houses. Btw. how are your experiences using Xyce? Do you get much speed up using its parallel processing capabilities?
    - deepnotderp 9y ago
      Our company isn't that big, and that's a fair point, but one of our circuit designers worked at Intel for over decade and reported the same experience. Xyce is new and has some syntax differences, so it's not a mature software quite yet, so there are some troubles there. But as we've been starting to make it work, it's given us some amazing speedups on large clusters.