Benefiting from ProjectSync's Web technology and integration with the design-management database, the team manager links the actual design files (and branches of design files) associated with an issue directly to the issue itself. In addition, ProjectSync saves the threaded discussion involving the affected engineers in a relational database for future reference. This is very valuable to the company for the long term because teams usually conduct these discussions through e-mail, which is essentially lost when an employee leaves the company or a consultant's contract ends.
Furthermore, by using keywords and multiple databases within ProjectSync, the team can manage bugs and defects, design issues, EDA tool issues, vendor issues, and so forth. This is all accomplished using the same tool with multiple databases—all easily accessible from the ProjectSync interface—from all locations over the Internet in a secure manner.
Managing the SIP supply chain: As mentioned earlier, design reuse is a fundamental requirement for this project. The team needs a seamless way to assemble and maintain a corporate IP repository. That repository provides enterprise-wide access to up-to-date revisions of internally developed IP. The team manager also needs to keep track of which engineers worked on each revision and manage the identification, evaluation, procurement, and implementation of externally sourced IP. The team chooses IPGear.
The IPGear Catalog is a convenient mechanism for finding and inspecting IP components from one's Web browser. A designer uses the IPGear Catalog to identify a new version of a particular IP block. The block's specs more effectively match the project's requirements than one of the company's legacy IP blocks. Comparing the performance of this block to others found and displayed in tabular form by the IPGear Catalog, the team decides to download and evaluate the block directly over the Web from the IP vendor's site.
Functionality Verified
This team downloads the IP on a new branch using a vault-to-vault transfer from the IP vendor's DesignSync vault to the company's own vault using IPGear. Because DesignSync implements Web technology, the transfer is fully secure and encrypted. The evaluation looks good. The team verifies that appropriate functionality is present, and the available regression test suites determine that the new features work as advertised in simulation. The team assigned to that block merges the new IP onto its branch and continues working. If for some reason the IP hadn't passed evaluation, the team would have notified the IP vendor via a problem ticket on the help-desk site and left the IP idle on the branch.
Two weeks from tape-out, the third-party IP vendor discovers a bug in the particular version of the netlist and test vectors that team scheduled to tape-out. The design manager and the designer working this branch automatically receive notification of this problem through IPGear e-mail.
Because both the IP vendor and the design team are employing DesignSync, in one command they download only the (correct version of) files that need updating into the appropriate project branch. They don't waste time sorting through an entirely new distribution tar (tape archive) file of the vendor's IP. The team manager creates a new branch and runs his verification suite. Now having successfully passed the IP block-level verification and timing tests, the design manager integrates the new release onto the mainline, the final regression is run, and the tape-out can happen on time.
Complex HDL-based SoC IC development can benefit tremendously from software-style parallel development techniques. This level of hardware complexity demands Web-based multisite support to facilitate parallel development activities across geographic and corporate boundaries. In addition to meeting these requirements, powerful, yet easy to use HDL design management, project management, and IP management tools are necessary. Thus, Web-based tools that perform these functions are a powerful addition to a company's EDA toolbox.