As RTL design started to increase in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, it was becoming apparent that some amount of management was needed to keep track of all the design files and their associated versions. Because of the parallels to software development, design teams looked to the tools and methodologies that were in use by software… Read More
It has been interesting to watch Methodics transform from an EDA company with their VersIC design management product to Life Cycle Management with ProjectIC, and now a Systems Company with WarpStor. Methodics was founded in 2006 by 2 ex-Cadence experts in the Custom IC design tools space, Simon Butler and Fergus Slorach. Today… 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
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
Let’s just take it as a given that securing IP design data is critical. It’s rather like saying that it’s a good idea to have security in the Tower of London to stop the crown jewels being stolen. IP blocks are the crown jewels of an SoC company.
Data now must be secured within the collaborative teams that share that… Read More
Almost all large projects these days are distributed across multiple geographic locations. As the world rotates underneath the sun, the focus of activity moves too: Europe, US, China, India, back to Europe. For this to work effectively requires a collaborative platform designed for multi-site design efforts, a platform that… Read More
Chip design is largely about assembling pre-designed IP, either developed in other groups in the same company, or brought in from a 3rd party, or occasionally developed within the SoC design group itself. But that makes it sound like it is a bunch of blocks linked together with some interconnect, but of course another important … Read More
My PhD thesis is titled The Design of a Network Filing System. Yes, that was a research topic back then (and yes, we did call them filing systems not file-systems). One big chapter was on access controls. There are several problems with designing an access control system:
Designing an SoC sounds way more exciting than bug tracking, but let’s face it – any bug has the potential to make your silicon fail, so we need to take a serious look at the approaches to bug tracking. When using an IP or an IP subsystem in a design, the SoC integrators require some critical knowledge about this IP. The actual… Read More
