The other direction is down toward placement and routing tools, where floorplanning can be used to gain more speed and control over hierarchical designs. Jacob Greidinger, vice president of Aristo Technology, presented a much more upbeat view. He spoke of the advantages of block-based design planning and predicted that the design planning market will grow much more quickly than the placement and routing arena. Herein lies a crucial difference. A floorplanning tool lets designers do some coarse placement and interblock routing.
Design planning is floorplanning plus estimation.
On the back end, they'll become prelayout prototyping and optimization tools, which is how Monterey Design Systems describes its new Sonar offering. All rights reserved.