The Linux Operating System for Chip Design - A Progress Report

by Earl Reinkensmeyer

This author contributed an article in June of 1999 entitled The Operating System Quandary for Electronic Design. In that article the author predicted that NT would have limited use for mainstream chip design and discussed the possible emergence of Linux in its place. This article is a progress report on Linux, and includes some of the interesting developments over the last nine months.

The reader is probably aware that IPOs for Linux companies have been as popular and successful as for .COM companies. This investment interest is driven by Linux's initial success in the commercial application arena. For commercial applications, Linux installations have been close to the level of UNIX installations over the last 24 months. There is new interest in Linux for embedded computing where Windows CE has a jumpstart. For commercial applications, NT still has the lion's share of new operating-system installations. Microsoft's Windows 2000 will also gain a share of this market.

For chip design there has been an increase in requests from EDA users for their suppliers to support Linux. Successful companies listen to their customers. Thus, the pace of Linux certification activity within EDA companies has accelerated. Those who have first offered their products on the Linux operating system now are beginning to report on their results.

Products offered or announced on Linux at this writing include:

Polaris Verilog simulator from Avant!

VCS Verilog simulator, VERA, CoverMeter and MemPro from Synopsys

TauSim Verilog simulator from Tau Simulation

CircuitScope transistor level static timing analysis from Moscape

Calibre physical verification from Mentor Graphics

ModelSim EE and SE from Model Technology, Mentor Graphics (general availability projected late 2000)

nDetect, nTime and nCompare debugging tools from Novas Software

Data Verification Suite from Denali Software

Synopsys recently reported that NVIDIA is successfully applying the Synopsys VCS simulator utilizing the Linux operating system for regression simulation of chip designs. The NVIDIA design environment includes UNIX, NT, and Linux. NVIDIA projects that, at this time, their growth of computing systems will favor Linux for their verification of chips. Synopsys reports that as they provide common support of VCS on UNIX and Linux, they have not experienced bugs related only to Linux. For simulation, the various flavors of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) available for Linux appear to be satisfactory.

Still missing, but having sufficient interest for development investment by Linux OS providers, is 64-bit and multi-processor computing support. This support is important for some chip design applications. RISC-based workstations and servers with these capabilities are already being utilized. At this writing Intel Itanium 64-bit processor systems are still in development and will enter the market shortly. RISC processor systems will still have an advantage over the new Itanium processor systems for EDA processes demanding large cache memory.

For Microsoft Office compatibility, an Internet office application for Linux coming from ThinkFree looks interesting. ThinkFree offers Internet-based office applications.

Chip designers prefer Linux over NT for reasons of commonality of job scripts with UNIX. Computer system reliability is very important for chip design projects. Early reports are that Linux is performing more reliably than NT. The writer expects users will find that complex EDA applications will still perform more reliably on UNIX-based workstations and servers with RISC processors compared to an "open code" Linux environment. That is if the Linux OS is utilized largely on computers with multiple sourced hardware and firmware components, as is typical for Intel or AMD processor based computers.

The initial application of Linux for chip design is occurring with the introduction of a small segment of applications. This is a good strategy to reduce risk. The Linux OS support model will be stressed as more tools from multiple vendors, or a robust chip design system from one vendor, is dedicated to Linux. The writer believes that the co-existence of UNIX and Linux for mainstream chip design will satisfy more designers than the attempt under way at moving to mixed NT and UNIX systems.

Reference
www.ThinkFree.com

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