OLA Standard Gains Ground

Electronic News, July 6, 1998 by Ann Steffora

Synopsys .lib format may still have chance

San Francisco, Calif. -- As was expected, a number of EDA vendors came out recently in further support of the Open Library API, a standard architecture used to access advanced ASIC libraries, which had been adopted by the ASIC Council in February.

At last month's Design Automation Conference held here, Ambit Design Systems, Mentor Graphics Corp., IBM and CADWorx all demonstrated OLA-compliant EDA tools. As well, ASIC Council members including IBM Microelectronics, LSI Logic, Lucent Technologies, and NEC Corp., pledged their support for the standard, all saying that they would provide production-level OLA libraries, some as soon as 4Q98.

Mentor Graphics demonstrated OLA capabilities in its design-for-test (DFT) and gate-level ASIC static timing tools, namely FastScan, for full-scan and structured partial-scan automatic test pattern generation, DFTAdvisor, for test analysis and synthesis, and SST Velocity, for gate-level ASIC static timing analysis.

Mentor Graphics also said its IP design flow will embrace and support OLA, so that Mentor's IP and tools can be more easily integrated into a design flow.

Ambit Design Systems showed its OLA-compliant BuildGates, logic synthesis tool; IBM had its Einstimer delay calculation tool; and CADWorx showed an ALF to DCL preprocessor/converter.

Work toward a single library format has been driven by the demand for increasing library accuracy and consistency, particularly in deep submicron design flows, coupled with systems designers' desire for a single library driving the majority of the design process. Also, ASIC vendors want to support a single library format to work with EDA tools in hopes of alleviating the need for support of multiple library formats.

The ASIC Council, following a lengthy process wherein Synopsys' .lib format was considered for standardization, adopted the OLA standard. The .lib format would have been a perfect fit because of its existing widespread use in the industry, but the ASIC Council and Synopsys could not come to an agreement (EN, April 6, 1998). Some in the industry have said it is not too late to adopt the .lib format, but the political issues may be holding things up.

Two other announcements, which are expected to promote EDA tool interoperability and tie logical and physical design more closely, came from Synopsys and Cadence Design Systems as previously reported (EN, June 22, 1998).

Cadence showed support for OLA and said it will focus OLA-compliant product development on for timing and functional verification tools. As well, Cadence will share its LEF and DEF experiences and expertise with the OLA Committee as it works to finalize the physical subset definition. Finally, Cadence said it will continue to be proactive in helping to implement interoperability, such as proposed by the OLA standards, especially in the areas of constraints, interconnect modeling, and IP exchange.