Using Cadence Remotely

I will be using VNC to remotely work from home using Cadence, I would
like to know what system requirements I should add to my Desktop to
maximize the speed. Do I need more memory, better video card, and if so
what is ideal. I'm looking to purchase a Dell XPS 410, thanks for the
input.

 

I imagine that #1 would be a fast Internet connection. If you're using a
cable modem or DSL then that will almost certainly be the limiting factor
considering how fast any new machine will be compared the the network. A
better video card would also help, something that has good 2D support
(though most of the 3D cards will be adequate).

Frank

 

Unless your home broadband (and your company's internet feed)
is >> 10Mbit/s, don't worry about it; the network will be the limiting
factor.

Virtuoso seems to be very "chatty", X11-network-wise. At 3Mbit/s
with VNC, schematics and small layouts are very usable. For large
layouts (say 1K transistors and up, maybe), set Filter size up as
high as you can stand and hope for the best.

To a certain extent, you can tradeoff between latency and draw
speed by setting compression (and perhaps using an enhanced
compression VNC like TightVNC); more compression means
longer latency (mouse lag, keystroke delay), but somewhat
better redraw time once it gets started.

-Jay-

 

It would be a *lot* more practical and productive to run Cadence on your local
peecee, and access the license server (and libraries and design objects) over
a network connection.

Even better is the above, using local copies of libraries and design objects.

/daytripper

 

I have had very good luck (especially in Virtuoso Layout) with
nomachine's NX (nomachine.com). Layout seems to get the most speed-up
from it, but schematic seems to be equal (or slightly better) than VNC.

 

Been there, done that, in my experience performance was truly
awful.

In the absolute best case, you'll have a 35ms ping time to your NFS
server,
more likely 50-75ms. NFS over a 75ms ping time link, running an
application that stat's *everything* (every directory, every file,
everthing)
5-10 times (I'm not joking) is no fun.

You would have to be working with local data, either brute-force, or
through
a version-control system with a local workspace.

Very likely the OP is running a Windows VNC client in any case, and
running locally isn't a trivial option.

-Jay-