Webinar: Collaboration Within Dispersed Design Teams

In the face of shrinking time-to-market windows, semiconductor companies are aggressively vying with each other to emerge with new or variants of existing ICs and SoCs to gain market share. The growth of the mobile market –wireless, networking, storage, and computing – as well as new areas such as the Internet of things (IoT) and wearables has resulted in an increased use of analog/mixed-signal (AMS) and/or RF functionality coupled with digital logic. To emerge as leaders in a specific market segment, design teams need to overcome increasing challenges to tape out chips successfully. Not only are teams using more IPs in a given design, they also are dealing with challenges such as developing complex functionality, managing multifaceted design flows using best-in-class tools, and complex mixed-signal verification, often in the face of shrinking geometries.

Webinar registration: Flow to improve collaboration within dispersed design team

Exacerbating all of the above is the difficulty of finding all the necessary talent in one location. This has resulted in semiconductor companies opening up design centers all over the world, wherever good talent is available, and investing heavily in the training of new college graduates. But for an SoC to be taped out on schedule, these dispersed design team members must work in tandem with each other as well as overcome their cultural and communication barriers. As the design teams get larger and spread across geographical boundaries, it becomes an increasing dilemma to coordinate the work amongst the team members, especially for analog and mixed-signal designs.

For design team managers and engineers to be more productive and efficient, they need quick answers to questions such as:

• What design changes have been checked in this week?
• Is the layout for this design DRC/LVS clean?
• The design was working yesterday. What changed?
• Which revision of the schematic was the layout created for?
• Which designs have been completed and frozen?
• Looks like the schematic had some ECOs! What exactly changed?

Managing large teams spread across multiple sites has never been very easy. It becomes more difficult when one considers the challenges of taping out a mixed-signal SoC successfully, across different time zones and cultures. To improve collaboration between multi-site design team members, it is important to lay the foundations of a good infrastructure and invest in data management software. Without the presence of design data management and a formal collaboration process, a lot of time is spent on needless communication. This often leads to a big loss of productivity for the engineers and creates spurious errors, which take considerable time to rectify.

Also Read: Leveraging Design Team Energy!

Of course, a data management solution has to work with complex design flows and enhance productivity rather than adding more overhead for the design engineers. To learn about a flexible, comprehensive and non-intrusive data management flow that works with different design tools and will help improve design collaboration between widely-dispersed team members, ClioSoft is giving a webinar on the use of the SOS Design Collaboration Platform integrated with Cadence Virtuoso® technology.

Webinar registration: Flow to improve collaboration within dispersed design team

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Leveraging Design Team Energy!

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Importance of Data Management in SoC Verification