ClioSoft at Arasan

Arasan recently adopted ClioSoft for data management (DM) for design and development of Arasan’s Silicon IP products. This morning I talked to Erik Peterson, Senior CAD and Verification Engineer AMS Design about their experiences bringing up ClioSoft.

Data management infrastructure is critical with engineering projects shared across different continents. Arasan’s development is distributed between the headquarters in San Jose and engineering sites in India. Currently the San Jose site and the Indian sites are up on ClioSoft with plans to bring the rest of the organization over to the new DM tools soon.. Arasan uses Cadence’s Virtuoso environment which ClioSoft’s SOS data management solution is tightly integrated with, making it painless to keep track of changes and versions.

The evaluation was done using two projects. When the decision was made to purchase the product the installation was straightforward. There is always some customization required to match a new tool to our methodology. ClioSoft was very responsive in anticipating our issues and provided exemplary customer service.

Before ClioSoft, Arasan’s DM required a lot more manual labor. But ClioSoft just works effectively and largely invisibly. The ideal infrastructure product works in the background and does not impact your development – unless something goes wrong – then you need prompt notification. It is not news when the trains run on time.

Another key advantage over a manual solution is the institutionalized learning that comes with a system that makes it easy to see what has been changed and inspect the reason. They can see what changes were made and what notes the engineer put in, and so this lets knowledge get reused more easily on other projects.

I asked Erik to summarize what they like about ClioSoft and their products:

• Close working relationship with customers
• Ability to solve an issue and reuse for separate project
• Database security, tracking, release control
• User learning curve, things “just work”
• ClioSoft’s outstanding customer service
• ClioSoft and EDA Direct’s flexibilty during eval
• Nimble and quick start, very short notice was not a problem

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