Review of ICED32				8
	Author: jrollins
	Review Date: 6/27/2000
	Tool Expereince: 7 years
IC Editors Review I've been using IC Editors layout products for about 7 years and the verification products for 2 years. I come from a Mentor V7/V8 environment where I was lead layout, CAD manager, and Sysadmin. The ICED editor tends to put a lot of people off because of it's "DOS-like" interface and it's many seemingly obscure configuration settings, but the tool is actually quite powerful and is without a doubt the fastest editor on the planet (no joke). It really shines running LVS. Even tools like Calibre could learn a thing or two from the IC Editor's netlist comparison tools. The user has complete control over every aspect of the comparison, and the thing is so smart it can generally be run without any layout text at all. There are, however, a number of configuration files to maintain, and unless you make good use of .BAT files you will find yourself spending a lot of time typing command arguments. The polygon-pusher is very capable and very fast, falling short only in terms of on-line Boolean functions, support of which is promised "real-soon-now". The macro-language is very capable and can be used to auto-generate devices. I've even set the tool up to auto-generate devices from a Spice netlist). The DRC and Extraction programs are good, but not great. All of the basic functions are there, but they have not been bundled (You will have to write a couple of lines to create a "SELECT ENCLOSE" function, for example, but this beats the hell out of Tanner and it's complete lack of SELECT functions). In terms of speed the DRC and Extract programs are good, but nothing special. It will take you hours to run DRC on a large CMOS circuit (100K+ elements). One will have to maintain a number of configuration files to use the tool with multiple processes, and some of these files can seem confusing, but once you understand the tool you will find yourself customizing it, writing macros, and marveling at it's speed and flexibility. You could spend twice as much and still fall short. Hope this helps! (And please forgive any typos...) James Rollins The I.C. Shop www.icshop.com

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