Srinath Anantharaman and Les Spruiell
Cliosoft and Synopsys

Designing tools for interoperability has become mandatory for the EDA industry. Standards and open architectures allow internal CAD teams to create the 'glue software' to quickly integrate a new tool into the flow. Published APIs help EDA vendors create a tight integration with popular tools and flows. Synopsys' Custom Designer's support for the OpenAccess database and ClioSoft's Universal DM adaptor enable version control and management of design libraries with just a simple configuration file. The open API and customizability built into Custom Designer and SOS may allow Synopsys and ClioSoft to create a tighter integration in the future. Authors of both companies explain how they did it.