Electronic design automation software developer Viewlogic Systems Inc believes it will cajole new customers into developing circuits on personal computers by offering its Workview Office tool set under Windows NT, Windows95 and Windows 3.1. It has redesigned its current Unix-based tool kits to work under Windows and has added some further tools to form Workview Office. These include Motive for Windows, a static timing analysis tool and VCS, the Verilog Simulation tool it bought when it acquired Chronologic Simulation Inc in April last year (CI No 2,387). Chronologic claims to have the highest performance Verilog Hardware Description Language digital simulator in the industry. Existing tools include ViewSim, for gate level simulation; ViewDraw for Windows for schematic capture of designs and Digital Fusion for Windows, which enables designs to be constructed in both Verilog and VHDL Hardware Description Languages. Workview also interoperates with Microsoft Office so that designers can describe a schematic in Word or present it as a spreadsheet using Excel, something the company feels will be highly useful to designers. Viewlogic reckons personal computers running Windows NT are now powerful enough to compete with, or in some cases, outperform Unix workstations. However, it neglected to mention that this software won’t run on any old personal computer. Most users will need a 75MHz Pentium with 32Mb of memory. The company said it is now looking at versions of Workview Office for Digital Equipment Corp’s Alpha RISC and PowerPC but would wait and assess customer demand for this two implementations. Workview Office will be ready sometime during the current quarter.
