Ian,
Thanks for the warm welcome!
Most of what I know about CDN comes from using a few of their products and reading EE Times. I'd have to caution that EE Times is a pretty forward-looking publication when it comes to EDA tools, so tools you read about in there most of the time will not be in widespread use for at least a year. For this reason, I pretty much have to base my trading decisions on stock price more than anything, not so much where the tools are headed.
Of course, if they were totally off the mark in their future offerings, I'd hesitate to buy. The price being as low as it is, and their announced products looking good, it's a very clear buy to me.
As for specifics on their products, my job 90% of the time is logic design, so I don't know what their offerings are in memory design, if any, beyond providing custom layout tools. (I should probably research this as a new stockholder.)
As for logic, their Verilog-XL simulator is pretty well entrenched in large companies that can afford it and tend to still have weird old testbenches lying around that don't necessarily work the same under competing simulators. By the time this goes away, I'd expect their newer Verilog-NC to be competitive with Synopsys' VCS, if it isn't already. (Another thing for me to check into. I'm sure market share numbers are out there somewhere.)
In synthesis, CDN finally woke up earlier this year and realized they now own Ambit and started marketing it. Last time I checked it was pretty evenly matched in quality of results and had faster runtime on large designs, but there were enough minor issues, like not wanting to change our scripts that kept my group from using it.
As for SOC and fine geometry designs, both CDN and SNPS need to get their logic/placement combined tools out to the masses ASAP if .25 really is mainstream. AFAIK, both are being used by some test sites now. SNPS has gotten some good press out of it, dunno about CDN.
If there are any CAD folks lurking, please chime in. My view of the whole tool is pretty narrow day-to-day. |
