I first heard about requirements management back in 1995 while marketing a graphic HDL entry tool for an EDA vendor, and it sounded like a very useful automation approach, however our team quickly discovered that there were too many different vendors for requirements management, so there could be no simple way to integrate with… Read More
Semiconductor design IP and verification IP have been around for decades, but just because your company has lots of IP doesn’t mean that you’re getting all of the benefits of a design reuse methodology. Maybe your business has encountered some of the following issues:
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
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
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
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 can large SOC projects effectively integrate sub blocks and IP into a stable version for release or internal development? The person responsible for integrating SOC sub blocks into a validated configuration for release has a difficult task. Usually there are many sub-blocks, each undergoing their own development. There… Read More
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
Years ago I thought that chip design companies would embrace the latest technology and be eager to adopt new tools. What I learned was that the people implementing and managing design projects were taking a lot of risks with almost every aspect of their projects. What they most wanted is to minimize risk from the design process – especially… Read More
Best practices call for using a version control system with systematic releases when developing IP. However, in the early stages of IP development using a rigid version control system with a cumbersome release process can hinder productivity. To fully understand how this works we should start by defining what is meant when we … Read More
