( DAC 10 Item 13 ) --------------------------------------------- [ 11/19/10 ]
Subject: ClioSoft SOS
OLD BUT NEW: In this down economy, it didn't surprise me to see users
yarping about ClioSoft. Why? Their sweet spot is the single project team
that needs a cheap, stable, really easy-to-use-and-install DDM tool. SOS
isn't fancy, but it does the job and for little $$$. This year it appears
that the Virtuoso crowd likes ClioSoft's new "Visual Diff" tool.
"What were the 3 or 4 most INTERESTING specific tools that
you saw at DAC this year? WHY where they interesting to you?"
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
One tool I really loved to see was the Visual Design Diff, from
ClioSoft. In my company we use XORs all the time in our verification
flow, so it was a nice change to be able to see results so quickly,
instead of waiting for a DRC run every time. Since my company has
already been using SOS for over three years now (and me, personally,
a lot longer), getting the tool was a no-brainer, because both of the
opportunity to optimize our processes and ClioSoft and their support
team are people I can count on when I have any questions.
- Rafaela Novais of Luxtera
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
This year at DAC I found ClioSoft's Visual Design Diff (VDD) utility to
be a really useful addition to their design data management product. We
have been using ClioSoft for over 6 years. VDD lets us quickly compare
two revs of a schematic or layout and the differences are highlighted
directly in the Cadence Virtuoso schematic/layout editor.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
I put Cliosoft's new "Visual Design Diff" tool in the "best" category.
The color-based views of schematic and layout differences should help
the designer with some "eye-popping" visual queue's to the different
versions. This is very helpful for solving human errors. (As in:
"Uhh... It netlisted fine yesterday...", "The last LVS wasn't this bad"
and "What did you change?", etc. )
This tool should reduce the drudgery of finding the change that you
didn't intend to make.
- John Williams of Zarlink Semiconductor
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
Cliosoft:
In the demo the AE demonstrated the simple installation & setup steps.
You can have there stuff installed, configured, and integrated in
Virtuoso within 10 mins.
The Cliosoft AE was asked to create a workarea on their demo project.
Their demo data was not too big, only around 10,000 objects. The
workarea creation took just a few seconds. They use symbolic links to
create a workarea which I think has advantages of disk space and speed.
The coolest feature was their graphical diff tool. You can graphically
see and step through difference between two versions of a schematic or
layout within seconds. I think this is one tool we can use immediately.
It can save us a lot of time.
It would be nice to have the ability to display version/status info
directly within the Cadence Library Manager. This is a limitation of
the Cadence Lib Manager. IC Manage has does it by providing their own
library manager. It would be nice to see the DM status in the Cadence
Library Manager instead of using a third party lib manager for just DM.
Overall, ClioSoft's system seemed powerful and well integrated with
Virtuoso and most importantly really easy to use.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
Cliosoft's DM tool has been part of our standard Cadence mixed-signal
flow for several years. Cliosoft now has a diff tool for schematics and
layouts that is integrated into the Virtuoso environment. Just select
the two versions and a graphical diff is generated. This is going to be
very useful for our layout team when they are working on late-night
ECO's and can't figure out the exact change the engineer made, even when
they may be described in a check-in comment and/or email.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
With Cliosoft Visual Diff, I no longer have to wonder "What changed?".
I can see it.
- Dan Kanna of Qualtre, Inc.
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
Synaptics has been using Cliosoft SOS and SOS with DF2 interface for
three years. During this time, the user pool has gone from 16 to 100.
Almost 20% of the company has accessed Cliosoft SOS either through the
SOS command line, SOS revision control of text files, SOS revision
control via Cadence DF2, and/or the SOS web-based client.
The SOS RCS tool has been used seamlessly by ASIC designers, software
product and test, and firmware engineers on both Windows and Linux.
We have had very few issues over the last three years, and what issues
that we have had have been resolved quickly due to the seven days a
week support that Cliosoft provides. I wish all my vendors offered
the level of support that Cliosoft offers.
- Brien Anderson of Synaptics
Index
Next->Item
|
|
