My career at Synopsys spanned 9 years and was focused entirely on front-end design. With each
new position within the company (FAE, Trainer, Consultant, Manager) I learned more about high
level design, coding styles, synthesis, scripting, optimization techniques, timing closure, timing
convergence and QoR. What I have noticed about the industry today, is that it is focused on the
wrong end of the development cycle. Fixing timing problems with better placement technology
is more of a last ditch effort than a state of the art approach. Ultimately, if the problem can’t be
fixed with placement – the designer has to go back to their RTL code and re-write it to fix the
problem. Code it correctly from the beginning, anticipating implementation roadblocks and
barriers, and you won’t need the big fancy tools to solve your timing convergence/closure
problems later in the design cycle.
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