I'm glad you spoke up, John!
I was a grader for the benchmark as well (I'm just a lowly board
designer like most of you) and just had a comment or two about the
benchmark. It makes me wonder how many people have a distorted view of
what the benchmark is all about (it wasn't until I became a grader that
I learned about it myself). I won't bore you with all the details, but
to my knowledge not ONE SINGLE PERSON in any decision-making capacity
has any connection to any EDA vendor. All of us graders are just board
designers from companies you may have heard of; I am from Intel, others
were from Dell, Compaq, Qualcomm, etc. All of us PCB designers except
for the organizer who I think is an EE/manager kinda guy (Martin) and
Pete, who is the editor of PCDesign Magazine.

The problem is, it is up to only about a dozen of us to try to think of
features to ask about, we break up the questions into categories and
each of us takes the SAME questions to ALL the participating vendors.
Since it only lasts one day we have less than an hour at each "station"
to try and get as much info as we can, and award points in a consistent
manner. I can tell you it is quite exhausting. When you say "Can you
show me that your split planes are intelligent and will report errors?"
then if they can show it they get a point.

If we have to evaluate how "cool it works" or how "easy it is" we would
get into a whole area of subjective evaluation and you can't cover a
dozen areas in less than 60 minutes fairly, wouldn't you agree? (they
argue and protest enough on just the "binary" grading system, a "gray
area" system would be madness)

Now, the only questions we asked were the ones we could think of. If you
and a few thousand of your closest friends want to suggest areas to
cover next year, you would be saving us a lot of work! Let us know what
you want to know! In advance! (but not yet, wait till January 1999 or
something, ok?)

I agree that the points systems might not be enough to make me choose
one system over another, personally I would want to hear from
experienced users. The problem with a mail-based system being proposed
is that it is difficult to know who to believe. When I first started
using Accel EDA (from PCAD) I thought quite a lot of it was ridiculous
and I complained quite loudly in public email forums about the software.
After I became accustomed to it, I was a little embarrassed because the
new features are definitely superior once you learn the PROPER way to
maximize them efficiently. So how do you deal with hotheads? The
dissatisfied people complain the most, and the benefits will be hard to
explain. The only thing I can think of is for readers to be able to
"grade" a post somehow so future readers would know which were valuable
and which were "a load of ****", but how ya gonna do that? Anyway, just
wanted to throw in a few thoughts...

Onward thru the fog,   Jack


        > The only real way to do what needs to be done would have
discussion amoung
        > the _users_ of different software package about a particular
feature.  That
        > way all the users would get input from the people "in the
trenches" rather
        > than getting a benchmark done by employees of an EDA company
who just MIGHT
        > have some bias toward a particular package.
        > Maybe more of a roundtable thing, maybe at one of the
conferences???
        >
        > --
        >     /\          Praegitzer Design -- Portland Design Center
        >    /\/\         George Patrick, Systems Administrator
        >   /\/\/\        Email: [log in to unmask]
        >  --------       Voice: (503) 531-2050 x1813, Fax:   (503)
531-2051
        >
        >  Webmaster: http://www.aracnet.com/~gpatrick
        >             http://www.dacafe.com/USERSGROUPS/cctug

        Hi all,

        I have to respond to this.... I was a "volunteer" in the PCB
Benchmark at
        PCB Design West. This was NOT done by "employees of an EDA
company who just
        MIGHT have some bias toward a particular package". This was done
by several
        DESIGNERS from several different COMPANIES who use different CAD
software.
        There was eight of us plus Pete Waddell, who during phone
conferences and
        meetings listed what we wanted and NEEDED CAD software to do.
Pete Waddell
        put out a call for "volunteers" to participate in this. I
believe it was also
        put on this group. If there are short comings in the list of
tasks we compiled,
        then "volunteer" for the next benchmark. There were several
items we had to
        throw out because there was not enough graders to evaluate the
task. I'm sure
        that although we did the best we could under the circumstances,
we probably
        didn't think of everything. I can accept that. But I can't
accept the
        appearance that this was done by EDA employees.

        Thanx,

        John Sabo
        voice:440.646.4643
        email:[log in to unmask]


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