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  • Runtime Design Automation RSS Feed

    Sandisk and NetworkComputer 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 05-07-2013 10:33 AM
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    Robert Veltman and Vikash Tyagi of SanDisk Corporation presented at SNUG a few weeks ago on their selection and use of RTDA's NetworkComputer to manage their workflows.

    Like everyone else, SanDisk has a high-performance computing farm (and like everyone else they are coy about how big it is) and lots of licenses for EDA tools, simulation in particular. You probably know that EDA tools use FlexLM to keep track of license use. ...
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    RTDA at Altera 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 03-12-2013 06:05 PM
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    I talked to Yaron Kretchmer of Altera to find out how they are using RTDA's products. I believe that Altera are the oldest customer of RTDA, dating back over 15 years, originally used by the operations team around the test floor before propagating out in the EDA and software worlds more recently.

    Altera use two RTDA tools, LicenceMonitor ...
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    A Brief History of RTDA 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 10-05-2012 05:06 AM
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    Andrea Casotto, the CEO of RTDA, started the company in Alameda in 1995, initially by himself, to market the FlowTracer software technology.

    The early version of the technology was created as part of his PhD thesis at UC Berkeley, when Andrea sought automated ways to help engineering students who were having problems using EDA tools in the wrong order. In 1993 he co-authored a paper with Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli ...
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    How Many Licenses Do You Buy? 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 07-23-2012 04:16 PM
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    An informal survey of RTDA customers reveals that larger companies tend to buy licenses based on peak usage while smaller companies do not have that luxury and have to settle for fewer licenses than they would ideally have and optimize the mix of licenses that they can afford given their budget. Larger companies get better prices (higher volume) but the reality is that often they still have ...
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    How to Use Those Licenses Effectively 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 06-12-2012 06:05 PM
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    So DAC is over and you are no longer thinking about the features and benefits of new tools or even the tools that you already own. But once you have lots of tools then you need to worry about how to use them efficiently.

    But here are three things that you need to worry about to get the most out of your EDA investment:
    • how do you measure the actual license usage?
    • how do you build
    ...
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    Going with the Flow at AMD 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 05-19-2012 09:00 AM
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    At EDPS in Monterey, Tom Spyrou of AMD talked about their compute environment in the context of parallel algorithms. I discovered that they are a big user of RTDA's FlowTracer so I talked to Philip Steinke at AMD about how they used it.

    He said that they largely use it as described in The Art of Flows as a graphical distributed make. They ...
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    RTDA at DAC: Scale to Millions of Jobs 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 05-10-2012 05:00 PM
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    RTDA is all about enterprise level scalability. Their three main products all scale to be able to handle the most demanding needs of large companies with large farms of servers. Of course there are some new refinements too.

    LicenseMonitor can scale to 70,000 simultaneous checkouts with 1 billion checkout records in the database. There are ...
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    Do you need more machines? Licenses? How can you find out? 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 04-26-2012 07:00 PM
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    Do you need more servers? Do you need more licenses? If you are kicking off a verification run of 10,000 jobs on 1,000 server cores then you are short of 9000 cores and 9000 licenses, but you'd be insane to rush out with a purchase order just on that basis. Maybe verification isn't even on the critical path for your design, in which case you may be better pulling some ...
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    The Art of Flows, Part II 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 03-31-2012 01:00 PM
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    Part I (here) looked at a bit of the history of scripting, makefiles and other approaches to more formally specify and institutionalize EDA design flows.

    The most sophisticated tool I know that looks at this issue is RTDA's FlowTracer.
    ...
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    The Art of Flows, Part I 

    by
    Paul McLellan
    Published on 03-28-2012 11:00 PM
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    These days, the flows that are used to build semiconductor designs are rightly regarded as part of the intellectual property of the company that developed and used them.

    But it didn't always used to be that way.
    ...
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