VIA Adopts Cliosoft

VIA Telecom, who makes CDMA base-band processor chips, picked ClioSoft SOS for use by its analog mixed-signal design teams. Like many such teams they use Cadence’s Virtuoso layout platform. ClioSoft’s SOS is seamlessly integrated into Virtuoso so that designers don’t really need to spend much time worrying about hardware configuration management (HCM), most operations take place as natural side-effects of using Virtuoso do do design.

Mobile ICs have especially short design cycles and have a large amount of IP integration which requires close co-operation between the engineers on the design team. This allows designs to be created quickly and accelerates the process of IP assembly and system-level verification without compromising the quality of the design management of design data and IP across the enterprise,” said Srinath Anantharaman, founder and CEO of ClioSoft.

SOS is also integrated seamlessly with the other main layout systems, Synopsys Customer Designer, Agilent’s Advanced Design System (ADS), Mentor’s Pyxis, and Synopsy’s (was SpringSoft’s) Laker. SOS has a client-server architecture and has full support for geographically distributed design teams. File revisions are brought to the remote site only once and other users get the files from the cache instead of going back to the primary site. This dramatically improves performance and reduces bandwidth use between sites. User workareas or Cache servers can subscribe to get immediate updates. The primary server pushes changes from the project repository to the subscribed caches or workareas as soon as they are committed. This technology minimizes the effects of network latency by batching queries and ensures that the time required to update a workarea depends on the number of changes made since the last update and NOT on the size of the project.

Design objects such as schematics or layouts are often saved not in one file but in a collection of co-managed files. Unlike traditional software configuration management systems, SOS recognizes and manages multiple physical files that make up a logical design unit as a single composite object. All the files that belong to the design unit are versioned, tagged, etc. as a single object. This ensures the integrity of the design unit and also improves performance.

Most designers prefer to have their own isolated workareas and update their workareas, to synchronize with the changes made by others, only when desired. When making modifications, the workflow is to check out the required design object, make changes in the local workarea, verify the changes and then check the design object back into the project. Other designers can get the changes only after the new revision has been checked in to the project.

However, some designers (especially layout engineers) need to work more closely. They need access to each other’s changes as they are made so all related changes made can be verified (LVS, DRC, etc) together before the set of design objects modified by these engineers are all checked in.
SOS allows design engineers to choose the way they want to work and supports both isolated and shared workareas.

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