( DAC 10 Item 12 ) --------------------------------------------- [ 11/19/10 ]
Subject: IC Manage GDP
FANATICAL USER BASE: When DDM first showing up at DAC, I freely admit that
I thought it was about as exciting as watching paint dry. But I have to
give IC Manage kudos for one thing; I've recieved 26 user fan letters about
them in the past 55 months. It's one thing to sell your own SW; it's quite
another when your own customers reach out to do it for you. Wow.
"What were the 3 or 4 most INTERESTING specific tools that
you saw at DAC this year? WHY where they interesting to you?"
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
IC Manage Global Design Platform (GDP)
I talked with Shiv Sikand, IC Manage's engineering VP at DAC about their
design data management product. One of the things that struck me is that
Shiv had a lot of knowledge of the kind of issues we are struggling with
regarding Dassault DesignSync, which we currently use in house.
One thing is IC Manage GDP's ability to create derivatives. Dassault's
method is to do branching of data, and although one of our project
managers can do it, it's quite complex from a user's point of view.
IC Manage's method is simpler: when a designer wants to tweak some aspect
of their design, they can prove out their change and fold it into the
main design via one simple command because GDP maintains the parent/child
and child/parent relationship. The designer can then choose whether or
not to automatically propagate their changes to all the derivatives.
Another thing is IC Manage's architecture which is efficient because it
uses streaming TCP data: when they transfer data to another part of the
world, it happens across a socket. In contrast, DesignSync uses an HTTP
protocol which has a time lag over long distance connections.
We need to consolidate our configuration tools and use just one system.
I think IC Manage GDP can handle this - we have already done a high level
internal evaluation of it. Individual text files are the simplest form
to be managed and our people could code this, but we want to integrate
all our design data, including our RTL files, files from our software
organization (C++ and Java - also text files but different from silicon),
plus our more complex Cadence data files.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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We met with IC Manage at DAC and have just launched an eval of their GDP
design data management (DDM) system. We are looking at it both for our
Virtuoso mixed signal flow and our digital design flow -- which is a
combination of Synopsys ICC, Cadence First Encounter and Magma Talus.
The primary DDM goals that we will be running the evaluation against:
- IP Data management for both third party and internally developed IP.
Right now we are using an internally developed basic file system to
hold all our IP, without any revision mechanisms in place.
- Design data management with distribution across multiple design
teams. Again, we currently use an internally developed file- and
named-based mechanism rather than a repository-based system.
- We need to assess GDP's performance across small bandwidth and
high latency and networks, between our local and remote locations.
Based on what we've seen so far, it handles the Virtuoso data well, where
we need to manage a bundled set of files concurrently, plus the digital
files well, which are less interdependent.
We need both types of data managed because we need version control and
synchronization across sites and teams. We don't want different design
teams working on the wrong version.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
IC Manage has a great product that provides lots of features to users for
database management.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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IC Manage - GDP (Global Design Platform) for Design Data Management
Seems like a good tool to manage your projects across sites, across
versions, and manage Cadence data and everything else all together. You
do need to start Cadence from the project specific directory to enable
the versioning of the Cadence data. You can do all the usual things of
selecting which data you want to be treated as "golden", running many
different projects simultaneously based on the same libraries, etc, etc.
GDP uses an independent window (i.e. not a Cadence window) to control
the project flow and project specification which keeps things clear and
relatively simple. They transfer only the incremental data updates
and thus require minimal data transfer compared to the size of projects.
(They guarantee the transactions to survive system failures!)
Unfortunately, I have no hands-on experience with GDP to provide details
on what does and does not work, but the demo and the specifications do
look quite impressive. GDP is built on "Perforce" version control
software - and the Perforce license comes with the GDP license.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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A couple of initial impressions on IC Manage GDP DAC demo:
I thought many aspects of the GUI for the IC Manage package were well
thought out and intuitive. I have used command-line driven CVS
repositories, and IC Manage seemed have a lot of flexibility and
capability in managing a design database.
Of particular interest to me was the ability to create projects out of
separate cells/databases while still maintaining version control. We
will most likely be further evaluating them for possible inclusion in
our tool set.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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IC Manage Global Design Platform (GDP)
IC Manage is the commercial evolution of cdsp4, a successful Open Source
integration developed in 1998 between the Perforce Fast Software
Configuration Management (SCM) System and the Cadence Design Framework II
tools. I had briefly collaborated while working at Cadence with Shiv
Sikand at SGI (circa 1999), now VP of Engineering at IC Manage, who
originally developed cdsp4 to streamline the MIPS processor and Advanced
Graphics development at Silicon Graphics Inc.
This tool is used to manage IC design databases (multiple versions) and
GDP provides backup, disaster recovery, revision control, configuration
management, tracking and fixing bugs and multi-site collaboration
capabilities between design teams.
This is somewhat similar to the Atria/Clear Case version control software
that I have used many moons ago. The concept is simple and applications
would work for a complex SoC implementation with analog/digital/IP blocks
with a bottom up design cycle. I have seen CAD engineers using ClioSoft
have migrated to IC Manage and vice versa.
Recently there was an announcement about integrating IC Manage within
Synopsys Galaxy platform. What synergies this is going to bring to the
design community remains to be seen.
- Dilip Tinnelvelly of ChannelVision
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