A new approach to hardware design project management

Simon Butler, Methodics
EETimes (9/20/2011 3:44 PM EDT)

Introduction

Data management has always been a pesky ‘background’ problem for IC designers, who usually found ways to stitch together reasonably effective solutions. In the beginning there were files and directories, and developers would version data by maintaining copies with unique names. Later, this was replaced by RCS/CVS simplistic file versioning. Over the years, next-generation DM (data management) and CM (configuration management) tools such as Perforce, Subversion, ClearCase, and Git have emerged that improve performance and reliability. These tools added a layer of abstraction over the file versioning problem.

As organizations evolved and (with Moore’s Law) designs exploded in complexity and size, many were forced to resort to multi-site design. File-counts grew, file-sizes expanded, and multiple DM repositories and even multiple DM tools were often used on a single project. Today, many design organizations struggle to keep project-data organized properly and communicate change effectively. Finally, exacerbating the situation, companies suffered from poor or no permission management strategy, bad performance, inconsistent data management systems, and spiraling disk/network resource requirements. There was no single way to control, measure, or manage the situation.

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