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From: Richard Lethin (lethin AT reservoir DOT com) Date: Fri Dec 01 2000 - 21:35:42 EST
Tanner's tools are really nice, he's got a nice niche with Windows safe from the other CAD gods. It does relegate the tools to toy designs, at least it did when we were trying to use his simulator in the early 90's to build the Message Driven Processor. The simulator itself was fine, but Windows was not suitable for large IO, memory, and so on. Magic is nice, but the GUI is slight beyond the border outside being tolerable for an undergraduate VLSI student to use. It's not a Linux thing - the Gnome interface is nicer than Windows. Magic's not supporting schematics is maybe a feature, but the interface from Magic layout to SPICE is abysmal, and it's embarrassing to teach using irsim. So I'd rather teach the students using Tanner. It doesn't matter if Windows is world class these days, because students are still doing toy designs. Tanner's also got a nifty MEMS suite. However, Windows is not a viable platform for education because I can't remotely administer the installation, check student designs to correspond with them when I'm off campus. I've learned the hard way at my office that administering windows systems is an endless time sink of registry problems, disappearing drivers, weird crashes, and so on. While Linux boxes stay up for months or years without being touched. Maybe the next generation Tanner will be written in Java. Michael Godfrey wrote: > > > What I'd prefer to see is the Tanner tools ported to Linux. > > I have known John Tanner and the Tanner tools since the beginning. > A couple of years ago I tried really hard to convince him to > port the tools to Linux, but he said absolutely NO. > > >From my perspective that was the day the Tanner tools became no > longer viable. Very sad. > > Michael > p.s. The Windows port of Magic is cute, but essentially useless. -- Reservoir Labs, Inc. 628 Broadway, Suite 502 New York, NY 10012 212-780-0527 http://www.reservoir.com
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