CAMPBELL, Calif.– IC Manage today announced its Big Data Predictive Analytics tool Envision, which provides real-time design progress analytics to allow project leaders, engineering managers, and integration leads to predict and manage their projects – keeping them on target. Envision also achieves IP Theft Prevention, to protect a company’s design IP from insider threats.
Design & IP Progress Analytics
Managing design and verification projects to schedule is the top priority for design teams. As the design progresses, strategic resource allocation decisions can make an enormous impact on whether schedules are met.
Envision offers the following design & IP progress analytics:
- Real-time Design Progress analytics
You can do schedule and resource management by capturing the engineering effort for a design module, based on the time delta between designer check out and check in, accessing activity down to the file level.
- SoC/Chip Real-Time IP Progress
Envision minimizes the burden of asking team members and management to spend scarce project and design time compiling status reports. Integration and assembly leads can view a real-time heat map of detailed progress reports for each IP across all specified tools. You can define automatic threshold levels for each tool to quantify the progress, such as error count, then flexibly modify your threshold.
- Tool Analytics for Resource Optimization
Envision continuously mines the millions of file changes that occur during a complex SoC project and effectively utilizes the design tool log files that are typically discarded today. It then uses Big Data analytics to filter and track specific aspects of various IPs and projects, automatically extrapolating to determine expected project delays according to a team or IP group. This tool drilldown allows you to make improved decisions on where to focus additional engineering, compute or license resources.
- Tape-Out Prediction
Project leads that have completed at least one project with IC Manage GDP can begin to take advantage of tapeout prediction analytics. As your first teams fully complete particular tasks (e.g. DRC) for your current design, you can uncover the relative resources (person-hours) required and compare it with your prior design.
These metrics can be categorized by design task, type or complexity so that realistic correlation can be achieved for active projects. Depending on the rate of resource usage vs expectations, you can make resource adjustments such as to compensate for delays and bring your project back on schedule.
Built-in Data Anonymization Option
Envision can anonymize your data for separation of analytics data from individual users, to prevent data abuse and maintain compliance with local laws and regulations regarding tracking employees.
IP Theft Prevention
Insider threats to your company’s design IP are insidious; IP thefts often go unnoticed, or are not caught until after the fact. Envision deploys four critical technologies to protect your IP against insider theft.
- Collects all your relevant data
You must track all your data to be able to detect suspicious activity. Envision collects and logs exactly who accesses what data, because it works with IC Manage GDP design and IP management system, where all design data is accessed over the TCP connection. This user activity is directly tied to the design data and changes, with timestamps.
- Stores your data securely
When data is simply synced from a repository, there is risk of it being read, stolen and copied to other directories, then hidden. Envision uses IC Manage Views virtual storage management, so that all file data is automatically logged at the server. Further, because the data is logged at the server, end point software monitoring tools, which can be potential attack points running on every node, are not required.
- Assigns Granular Data Access Permissions
With traditional systems, the security plane is often embedded in your metadata. So either complex file access attributes must be maintained, or users are given access to a broader set of data than necessary.
Envision works with IC Manage Views and allows you to assign granular permissions by cluster, so that design team members only see & modify their own authorized subspace. For example, an IP owner only sees his IP, not the rest of design. A designer only sees his design module, and the RTL for the various IP he is incorporating in it.
- Applies Threat Prevention Big Data Analytics
With many companies having thousands of users with so much activity, generating billions of records daily, you usually cannot identify IP theft until after the damage has occurred.
Envision uses Big Data Analytics to mine and filter through billions of records to immediately flag the risky behavior such as an engineer starting to copy project trees that he is not submitting code to or that are a known inactive project. Because this analysis is happening in real-time, you can set rules to stop the transaction and instantly revoke access, thus actually preventing the theft.
About IC Manage
IC Manage provides high performance design data and IP management solutions for companies to efficiently complete designs across their global enterprises. Design teams using IC Manage improve product quality, designer productivity, and global collaboration, while maximizing their IP reuse. IC Manage customers include Altera, AMD, Broadcom, CSR, Cypress, Entropic, Juniper, Maxim, Mediatek, NVIDIA, Rambus, Samsung, Sandisk, Xilinx and other top semiconductor and systems companies. IC Manage is headquartered at 2105 South Bascom Ave., Suite 120, Campbell, CA. For more information visit us atwww.icmanage.com.
