Pulsic recruits Afterthought Software

Published 04 September 2012 under news, software, consultancy

Leading physical design software company, Pulsic, has recruited Afterthought Software to undertake major benchmarking tests. Pulsic software improves the design productivity at leading companies in the memory, microprocessor, custom digital, custom ASIC, imaging and analog markets worldwide, by automating the layout of peripheral and control logic. Afterthought Software will be making a comparison between wxWidgets and Qt. Both are graphical application frameworks which can be developed using C++ programming language, have a native look-and-feel and support Mac OS X, Linux and Windows, providing flexibility for Pulsic's end-users.

Project lead Alex Duller of Afterthought Software says: "This is a really interesting job for us and exploits the full potential of our services.

"An important feature required by Pulsic is being able to rearrange and separate parts of the user interface. This is known as docking. Both Qt and wxWidgets support docking so we will look at the aesthetics and how easy it is to develop applications with docking.

"Pulsic's new tool will involve drawing tens of millions of rectangles onto a canvas in the interface and then being able to pan and zoom what has been drawn. Different drawing techniques will be tried and then speed tested using a range of datasets from Pulsic.

"We will also benchmark for raw drawing speed to compare the two frameworks and look at the different types of widgets that Qt and wxWidgets support.

"Pulsic has also asked us to compare how well Python scripting language could be used for writing plugins to the main application. Various architectures for allowing this integration will be tried and some options presented to Pulsic."