3 Small-Team Design Productivity Challenges Managed

3 Small-Team Design Productivity Challenges Managed
by Don Dingee on 09-21-2016 at 4:00 pm

“Data management tools? We use small teams doing small designs. Each project only has two or three designers. Everyone uses the same EDA tools. Why do we need another tool for collaboration?” Good question. If you enjoy frequent meetings and redoing work because someone didn’t understand the status of IP blocks, the answers may… Read More


Go Native – With Methodics at DAC in Austin

Go Native – With Methodics at DAC in Austin
by Tom Simon on 06-01-2016 at 7:00 am

DAC is often a yearly reflection point for the companies that exhibit and attend. For the innovators it is an opportunity to look back and see a year of progress and development. Fortunately, this is the case for Methodics, which has had a strong year both in terms of business and technical development. Though, we easily see how these… Read More


Bulking Up of Design Data Calls for Version Control on Steroids

Bulking Up of Design Data Calls for Version Control on Steroids
by Tom Simon on 05-17-2016 at 4:00 pm

Even though design management systems are gaining popularity as a way to manage design data growth, they actually contribute to the problem of exploding data size. What we already know is that a linear increase in die size causes exponential growth in chip area, and that smaller feature sizes compound this effect in the same way.… Read More


Making PLM Actually Work for for IC Design

Making PLM Actually Work for for IC Design
by Tom Simon on 04-12-2016 at 12:00 pm

The topic of Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) conjures up images of usage on airplanes, tanks and cars. That’s because it was developed decades ago to help make product development and delivery more efficient for big expensive manufactured products. It worked well for its intended markets by combining and managing all the … Read More


What SOC Size Growth Means for IP Management

What SOC Size Growth Means for IP Management
by Tom Simon on 03-22-2016 at 12:00 pm

Whether or not in the past you believed all the of rhetoric about exploding design complexity in SOC’s, today there can be no debate that SOC size and complexity is well beyond something that can be managed without some kind of design management system. As would be expected, development of most larger designs relies on a data management… Read More


How to Overcome HW Project Release Nightmares

How to Overcome HW Project Release Nightmares
by Tom Simon on 12-21-2015 at 8:00 pm

Is a software development release methodology a “square peg in a round hole” when it comes to hardware design? To answer this question we have to look at how exactly hardware design projects differ from their software counterparts. Intuitively we know they are fundamentally different. Let’s take a second to dig deeper to understand… Read More


Top 10 Reasons to Use Industry-standard Data Management

Top 10 Reasons to Use Industry-standard Data Management
by Paul McLellan on 04-21-2015 at 7:00 am

Should a semiconductor/IP company use a proprietary data-management (DM) environment? Or even develop their own? After all, every company is unique and developing a unique DM allows a perfect match of just what is required for that particular company. And, in principle, a proprietary DM system can underpin the design management… Read More


Design Collaboration across Multiple Sites

Design Collaboration across Multiple Sites
by Pawan Fangaria on 09-02-2014 at 12:00 pm

Any SoC or IC design project, whether implemented at the same design site or multiple sites requires some data management tools to manage things such as a central data repository, revision management of files, etc., for effective co-ordination of work among different team members. Given the challenge of meeting the shrinking… Read More


Speeding up IP and Data Management

Speeding up IP and Data Management
by Daniel Payne on 08-09-2014 at 8:00 am

IP and Data Management (DM) for SoC teams has gradually moved from ad-hoc approaches using simple Excel spreadsheets, to home-grown software that is specific to a project or company, and finally to commercially supported tools. One such commercial toolset for IP lifecycle management is from Methodics, named ProjectICRead More


Digital, Analog, Software, IP – Isn’t it all just the same?

Digital, Analog, Software, IP – Isn’t it all just the same?
by Daniel Payne on 04-25-2014 at 8:31 pm

Designing an SoC requires a team, and the engineers typically use lots of specialized EDA software and semiconductor IP to get the job done. Many have started to ask about how designing a chip is different than designing and managing a large software project, or how is analog design different than digital design in terms of managing… Read More