Increasingly, system-on-a-chip (SoC) design is a discipline that requires its practitioners to look, at least during some parts of the design process, at the big picture. Certainly, at times, it's necessary to drill down into small segments of the overall design to examine them in detail. But the whole point of system-level design is efficiency, which is borne on the wings of design reuse.
Design reuse is a great concept that should make the creation of complex SoCs much easier. It also depends on that "big picture" view of the design process and asks the designer to think in terms of blocks. This is a natural view of designs that best enables engineers to handle a very complex SoC.
Thinking about a design at the block level is one thing, but managing the mountains of data comprising the design in that fashion is another. When one considers that today's design teams are global and multi-organizational in nature, the problem takes on another dimension of complexity. SoCs are created using a mixture of newly developed IP blocks, reused internal blocks, IP licensed from other vendors, and blocks designed by other organizations under contracts (Fig. 1). All of this information quickly mushrooms into a management nightmare without the proper tools.
Design data-management tools aren't a new idea, but to date, no tools have organized SoC design data at the block or hierarchical level. Existing tools manage data at the file level without maintaining the connections between files that constitute a given block within the overall design. But Synchronicity Inc., Marlboro, Mass., has come up with the missing link that ties its own file-based data-management tools together in a suite that takes design data management up to the hierarchical level.
The Hierarchical Configuration Manager (HCM), when used in concert with Synchronicity's existing DesignSync, ProjectSync, and IP Gear tools, manages all data associated with an SoC design project from a hierarchical perspective. Beyond this, it tracks the communications between far-flung team members, and solves the problem of accurately recreating design hierarchies at any point in the past. It also manages the versions and customizations of the design tools used to create the design.
Management of the files associated with a given SoC block is itself a daunting task. The end product is the physical design files, of course, but thousands of files can be associated with the creation of one IP block. These can include synthesis files, schematic captures, architecture documents, and much more. But a change to given files within this entire mass of information can cause a ripple effect that propagates upward throughout the design hierarchy. The HCM keeps that information up to date and correct for all users.
The tool doesn't simply keep track of all current versions of the files related to an IP block. Most of what the tool does applies to an entire hierarchy of linked blocks. This includes retrieving data from a central repository, committing changes to share with others, or creating a snapshot of a design that can be worked on at any point in the future.
All of the files comprising each block are revision-controlled automatically, or can be worked on individually with DesignSync, Synchronicity's file-based data-management tool. With HCM placed atop DesignSync, and by making use of DesignSync's built-in Web-enabled multisite capabilities, any block in the hierarchy can be defined and managed by any design team, whether it's intracompany or intercompany.
Also through the HCM, the concept of design hierarchy is brought to bear in Synchronicity's ProjectSync tool. A collaboration tool, ProjectSync enhances design-team productivity by allowing the sharing of up-to-date ideas, issues, bug reports, engineering-change information, and much more via a standard Web browser. The HCM and ProjectSync combination lets a project manager determine, for example, the number of open issues related to an entire design hierarchy. Managers can also be notified when any block in the design changes.
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