( ESNUG 479 Item 9 ) -------------------------------------------- [02/05/09]
From: [ The Man In The Yellow Hat ]
Subject: One designer's detailed comparison of ClioSoft vs. IC Manage
Hi, John,
My company requires that I be anon.
We've used IC Manage's Design Management system, called their Global Design
Platform (GDP) for 2 years, including our 3 month eval period. We began
using IC Manage on production designs immediately after the eval. We have
taped out 4 independent designs and 8 derivatives of those designs.
We use IC Manage for our 45 nm designs for our non-volatile storage chips.
Our designs have historically been full-custom, but that has changed rapidly
and our chips now contain a mixture of full-custom and ASIC components. We
use IC Manage for all our design data:
- Design and technology libraries
- Cadence's Custom layout and schematics
- RTL
- Digital implementation database
- VCS Verification environment
On top of this, we have moved most of our supporting scripts and in-house
tools into IC Manage.
IC Manage vs. ClioSoft:
We had been using ClioSoft for 2 years, but switched to IC Manage after
doing benchmarks and a in-depth functional review during the evaluation
period. I have details below to share with your readers. Where I have
info on both I provide it; in some cases I only have info on IC Manage.
1. Local Performance
IC Manage's local performance is good. We use a dedicated server tuned
for performance, and are able to populate a workspace containing several
gigabytes of data in minutes. IC Manage takes 25 minutes to sync 10Gb of
data from the repository.
This is a 10x improvement over our previous use of ClioSoft. ClioSoft took
about 40 minutes to sync 1.5Gb of data.
The difference in project size comes from the fact that only custom layout
and schematic data was managed by ClioSoft. IC Manage managed this and a
lot more, as described above.
2. Remote Performance
Our design centers span across 3 continents, with all of them needing to
share a common set of data. The IC Manage proxy architecture mitigates the
low-bandwidth high-latency connections between our different design centers
as much as possible. We have been able to obtain a level of performance
coming close to that of a local connection, but using links that are
hundreds of times slower. In our benchmarks it took the same 25 minutes to
sync the 10Gb worth of data with IC Manage.
3. Client/Server Protocol
ClioSoft required client-side daemons for each user/workspace combination,
which made our admin of it a complex and frustrating task. The daemons
were slow to start up and shut down, and most importantly, they behaved
erratically, often becoming completely unresponsive. This inevitably led
to time-consuming around-the-clock effort for support and debug.
IC Manage has a client/server architecture, with no requirement for
client-side daemons, so this support/debug effort is completely
eliminated. Due to the IC Manage server's high-reliability, our
administrator's overriding concern becomes the state of the network, which
is as close to an ideal situation as possible for us.
4. Downtime
IC Manage. Disregarding downtime due to general network issues, the only
significant downtime we've seen with IC Manage is in remote sites when MySQL
replication stops due to a variety of different reasons. We periodically
run automated utilities to detect this condition, and once a downed
replication server is identified, it can be brought back up in 15 minutes.
ClioSoft. Downtime was almost always seen on a case-by-case level, with
the majority of issues being related to client-side daemon problems.
Furthermore, resolving them was painful because the issues were not
global but instead had to be handled for each user reporting a problem.
5. Cadence Interface
IC Manage replaces Cadence's out-of-the-box library manager with their own
optimized version, which preserves all commonly used features available in
the default library manager, but with a more responsive and descriptive
interface. Our designers can either browse through the libraries or bring
up the checkout/sync managers, to instantly see:
- What versions of what cells are currently in their workspace,
- What cells are checked out by themselves and others
- What cells are out-of-date in the workspace.
ClioSoft uses Cadence's out-of-the-box library manager, where querying for
any of that information was a definite pain.
6. Scalability
IC Manage's high-availability server augmented with proxy servers gives us
a scalable infrastructure that supports 100s of users needing simultaneous
access across multiple design centers. Its single repository containing
all revision history across all projects results in a scalable data model
because we don't have to maintain data on multiple servers. This preserves
data on what versions of what files are shared by which projects, which
would otherwise be lost during the shuffling of data back and forth across
repositories.
ClioSoft required creation of independent data repositories for every
project, leading to data bloat and increased cost. They had independent
repositories, making it difficult to share modules that were common across
projects. Eventually designers needed to copy the same data across multiple
repositories, which complicated and inflated the design environment.
Shuffling data back and forth across repositories results in lost data and
lost version history prior to the point of copying.
7. Configuration-based Workspace management
IC Manage uses a configuration-based approach of managing workspace content
which is superior to ClioSoft's RSO methods. IC Manage breaks down our data
into categories, projects, variants, libtypes, libraries and configurations.
It's a natural for partitioning our designs via a structural GUI that lets
us organize according to components and workflow. The IC Manage Project
Manager GUI clearly displays the design hierarchy making it easy to
manipulate and report all projects. The users know exactly what they are
getting, e.g. latest development data and/or release data.
ClioSoft's quirky Revision Search Order (RSO) mechanism uses a best fit
approach, iterating until it finds the best match, then builds the
configuration from that match. Their RSO interface relies on the use
of tags, which may be fine for small designs, but becomes intractable
as the complexity of designs grow. This approach is potentially non-
deterministic and, in my opinion, is inferior to IC Manage's configuration-
based approach.
8. Automated Workflow and Data Structuring
IC Manage. The way IC Manage structures data is a key advantage over
ClioSoft.
- Data is shared across projects via a single repository. Nothing is
physically replicated in the repository that doesn't need to be, so
only necessary data is sent to remote sites.
- We can do project-specific edits of common data, and IC Manage
automatically records the point of divergence. We can have different
sets of projects sharing different revisions of the same file, without
ever losing track of which projects have which revisions and where in
the file's lifecycle the divergence between projects occur.
- IC Manage's integration history ability is quite useful. I cannot
overemphasize the value of this inherent bookkeeping as the
complexity of our projects continues to increase.
ClioSoft. None of the above functionality was available, due to ClioSoft's
models of having separate and independent repositories for each project.
ClioSoft did not have a clean and tractable solution for reuse and design
assembly.
Additional Information on IC Manage:
1. Set-up and Maintenance
IC Manage did our initial set up via on-site support. Our ongoing
maintenance is minimal because upon reboot, IC Manage GDP automatically
invokes backup software and scripts for start-up. We perform database
optimization once a quarter to keep the system tuned for high performance,
which requires about 45 minutes of downtime. We schedule nightly database
backups of the metadata during an off-peak interval, which requires 5-10
minutes of downtime.
2. Querying and Reporting
IC Manage's low latency retrieval of both state and design data is critical
because our data management software has to work with interactive tools.
The IC Manage super-proxy is the key to low-latency reporting because it
does quick replication of metadata from the master server to super-proxy
servers that are local to the client. Their Sync Engine serves a dual role:
- It keeps read-only project references up-to-date
- It seeds new data in remote sites to ensure rapid delivery of content
as they are requested.
3. Support
IC Manage support is good. Our questions are answered promptly - usually
within 15 minutes - and fixes/patches are sent out in days as opposed to
weeks with other vendors. Our enhancement requests are all given
fair consideration, and after a decision to incorporate a new feature has
been made, their time-to-release is only 1 to 2 weeks, which is outstanding.
For requests that are more company and/or design-specific, the support staff
works closely with us to understand, recommend, and either implement or
help-implement the solutions. I can't stress enough the high-level of
support IC Manage has provided us.
4. Weaknesses/Need for improvement
No link-to-cache workspace model. The lack of this feature increases sync
time and inflates the size of each workspace. Hand managing workspace
configurations fixes the problem, but at the cost of additional complexity
and admin support.
IC Manage documentation is consistently playing catch-up. This will most
likely result in significant hand-holding by IC Manage support, especially
for customers looking to try new features as soon as they are released.
- [ The Man In The Yellow Hat ]
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