As the EDA industry has matured, multivendor interoperability has steadily improved. In the 1980’s, if you had design data in a Daisy Logician, there was practically no way to extract it. Then, with the rise of standard file formats such as EDIF and the currently popular quartet of LEF, DEF, Verilog and GDSII, multivendor interoperability became possible, albeit painful. In the late 1990’s, Avanti’s Milkyway and Magma’s Volcano databases provided excellent interoperability across tools, but the interoperability was limited to the respective company’s product line.
Procedural access to other EDA companies’ design databases was out of the question. As Avanti CEO Gerry Hsu once declared, “We let nobody suck our blood. We suck other people’s blood, but nobody sucks our blood!” Gerry considered interoperability between his tools to be the lifeblood of Avanti, a competitive advantage that was to be jealously guarded. While other CEOs were less graphic that Gerry, all EDA vendors who had any blood to suck shared his attitude. Meanwhile, EDA users got by using text files for multivendor interoperability.
Finally, powerful EDA customers like Agere, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, LSI Logic, Freescale and STMicroelectronics got fed up with the limitations of text file data exchange and demanded procedural access to a common database. While the intervening machinations are beyond the scope of this paper, the result is that everyone now has C/C++ procedural access to both Cadence/Si2 OpenAccess and Synopsys Milkyway.
API or File Exchange?
The question is now whether you as an EDA tool developer should take advantage of the Milkyway and OpenAccess APIs, or stick with the classic LEF, DEF, Verilog and GDSII.