On the heels of their Verdi3 announcement, Springsoft continues its triplication, now with Laker3. They position Laker as the “best established interoperable custom design flow.” As with all carefully-crafted positioning statements, the key qualifier they use here is “interoperable.” This refers both to the fact that they use the OpenAccess database and to their ability to integrate with Mentor’s RealTime engine for on-the-fly Calibre checks.
Part of the upgrade deals with the usual performance and GUI enhancements. They’ve paid particular attention to file I/O, which is a significant bottleneck, and drawing speed; they improved the former by 2-10X and the latter by as much as 6X.
They’re also targeting the more aggressive geometries, with support for double-patterning in their new, unified DRC engine that supports automatic place-and-route (but not sign-off DRC).
But the newer and more different addition they’re touting is their analog prototyping tool. It will take circuits and automatically detect patterns to generate layout constraints. Those constraints can be manually edited and iterated until place and route gives the desired result. We actually saw something like this with Cadence’s Circuit Prospector before; Springsoft claims that theirs is a much more automatic process, with Cadence’s solution requiring SKIL programming.
You can find more in their latest release…
