Qorvo and KeySight to Present on Managing Collaboration for Multi-site, Multi-vendor RF Design

Over the last several weeks I’ve been having a lot of discussions with colleagues around IP reuse and design data management. This led me to a discussion with Ranjit Adhikary, Marketing Vice President for ClioSoft.

ClioSoft is best known for their design collaboration software platform called SOS. They also sell an enterprise IP management platform that works in conjunction with SOS. As I spoke with Ranjit it became clear to me that a discussion about IP and design management really is indeed a discussion about how to work in a collaborative environment. IP blocks are simply an artifact of collaborative design that must be managed.

So backing up a bit I started to quiz Ranjit about what they are seeing in the design arena today and how this has affected how they are marketing their products. With the advent of the internet of things (IoT), a key driver for ClioSoft’s business for last two years has been wireless design. How so you might ask?

Well, wireless implies RF, analog and mixed signal designs and these types of designs are typically done using full-custom design methodologies. Further, full-custom design methodologies imply lots of hands-on engineering work in interactive EDA tools. To handle complexity, designs get carved up into blocks that can be easily managed by humans. Large designs use lots of hierarchy and lots of blocks. Combine this with ever increasing competition and ever shortening design cycles times, and that means you must have big teams of engineers working simultaneously on these designs with the need to collaborate with each other.

To make matters more complex, companies that create these type of RF and mixed-signal ICs typically come about through multiple rounds of mergers and acquisitions and as a result, have design teams scattered around the world in multiple locations across multiple time-zones and many times with multiple different EDA tool sets. As you can imagine, this is a very fluid environment and can be fraught with peril as a company gets closer to tape-out time. The worst case scenario being that the left hand doesn’t always stay in sync with the right hand and a design gets taped-out using a wrong and incompatible version of a block making the entire IC dead on arrival.

This then begs the question of how do companies manage these types of designs when using geographically dispersed design teams with different EDA tools? Ranjit started to explain more of the details about how their product offerings help and then stopped short and said, hey why am I telling you this? We are hosting a webinar in a week’s time where one of our customers, Qorvo, and one of our EDA partners, Keysight, will be presenting on just this topic. You should attend the webinar and they can tell you in their own words how they are managing RF designs in just such an environment. Qorvo will talk about how they manage their RF designs and Keysight will talk about how they handle the issues of EDA interoperability.

Great, I’m all in! And…while I’m at it, I’ll let everyone else know about the webinar as well because if I’m asking, I’m sure everyone else is probably thinking the same thing. The webinar is being hosted by ClioSoft and will be held on February 1[SUP]st[/SUP], 2017 at 10:30am PST. To register for the webinar simply follow this link and use the “CLICK HERE TO REGISTER” button at the bottom of the page.

In the meantime, if you have interest to learn more about ClioSoft’s offerings you can visit their website at: www.cliosoft.com.

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