VLSI Birds of a Feather
PAD Powell[Admin]
padpowell at wateng.UUCP
Sun Jul 17 07:02:39 AEST 1983
There was a VLSI BOF at the Usenix. About 1 1/2 hours was devoted to the
discussion of VLSI design software. The following totally unsubstantiatable
rumours and statements were made. These are unsubstantiated because nobody
would make them officially, and we all know the reactions of the various
Blue Suits to the problems.
1. Bell Labs will never again release any CAD software of any sort for
any reason. This is an example of the "Once Burned, Twice Shy"
syndrome.
2. The fellows down at MCNC indicated that they would be willing to distribute
their tools that they have developed. Copies of the Z paper were
made available; further documentation will be posted in either
a directory on their machine or in net.sources. General reaction
of people at the BOF and of me after reading the paper is that the
package is well thought out and very useful. They also described
their language (ABCD: A Better Circuit Description), EFG
(Editor For Graphics), HIJ, KLM, etc. One of the few examples of
humour seen at USENIX.
3. Various people described what their groups were doing. University
of Washington is working on DARPA funded project to gather
up tools and distribute them to other people. They indicated that
there was not much problem gathering, but distribution is a
real nightmare. A project funded by Philips in Europe is
pounding along, and has some tools available for European Universities.
Philips is providing a silicon foundary service for the project.
U. of Waterloo is working on the Canadian Microelectronics
project, involving the selection of a workstation and developement
of CAD tools for the Canadian Universities. This venture also
involves Queens, where the VLSIIC people are providing foundary
services for University Courses.
4. A general cursing session involving the lack of a standard for mask
generation or description. There was an expressed desire for a
published CIF or whatever standard. Perhaps we should get an IEEE
committee working on this? In addition, there was griping about
the lack of conversion programs from CIF to mask generator format.
5. People indicated that they were interested in various types of simulators.
General conclusion is that Unix is not a nice environment to run
a simulator written in Fortran. Clearly there is a user community
here which needs a better fortran under UNIX. Perhaps, now that DEC
supports UNIX, it might be possible to "port" their VMS fortran
compiler into UNIX. It might (Heaven Forbid) even become the basis
for paying money to DEC for a compiler.
6. There was great interest in the transporting of data/programs between
various systems. U. Waterloo experience in IBM/UNIX data transfer
was recounted; libel laws do not permit expression of the authors
views about this experience. It is clear that a UUCP/UUX
facility for VMS/UNIX/VM would be really nice, and in fact would
be essential. This is really a reinvention of the effort that
Bell Labs went through with their Designers's Workbench things,
presented at the 1981 Design Automation Conference.
7. It was decided to attempt to rename net.lsi into net.vlsi. This would
be done by creating net.vlsi, and terminating net.lsi. Also,
people would like to know what happened to fa.vlsi, as nothing
has been coming over into usenet lately.
It was fun meeting all of you, and I hope we can do this again. Remember,
there will be a conference up here in Waterloo in September; details will
be posted in net.vlsi
Patrick ("Did anybody get any sleep?") Powell
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