I've been in physical design since 1997. Back then we were using Cadence Gate / Silicon Ensemble. We tried the various Avanti tools. Aquarius, Astro, Apollo.

I've been in physical design since 1997. Back then we were using Cadence Gate / Silicon Ensemble. We tried the various Avanti tools. Aquarius, Astro, Apollo. I don't remember the exact order but all the space theme names are where the MilkyWay database comes from that is still in Synopsys IC Compiler. I remember that when the court actually compared the source code they found that some of the comments had the same words misspelled in the same way. Two programmers may pick the same variable names but they aren't going to misspell words the same way in comments unless it was stolen code.