San Diego, Calif. – June 6, 2011 – Targeting the escalating design data and IP management issues related to advanced system on chip (SoC) design, Methodics LLC, today announced the latest version of its SoC Management Platform solution. The standards-based solution, which is easily integrated into IC design environments, is geared toward improving both enterprise-level collaboration and management, while also increasing individual productivity and efficiency when dealing with the complexity of modern SoC design methodologies and IP use. The result is higher quality SoC design, lower development and infrastructure/IT costs, and more efficient use of design resources.
The platform includes a new version of the company’s ProjectIC SoC portal for enterprise level visibility and control across designs. Also included is a continuous build capability for managing IP verification and promotion, as well as performance enhancements to expedite data updates. A new client module, the BuildIC IP integration engine, assembles design workspaces based on a Bill of Materials (BOM), updating and sharing among engineers and multi-site design groups.
“The EDA and IP industries have done a great job of automating and improving efficiency of SoC design tasks. But the overwhelming challenge of managing the associated data and processes involved is threatening to undermine all that progress. IC design is one of the last frontiers in terms of enterprise information management, and product development from the executive level is a black hole as far as visibility and predictability. Methodics looks to have a practical approach to providing much needed information access, control and coordination for managers and engineers, which will allow companies to realize the true potential of SoC design,” said Jim Hogan, noted semiconductor industry expert.
“The dirty little secret of the advanced SoC design methodologies being enabled by EDA and IP vendors is the tremendous amount of data management and project coordination challenges they introduce. Engineers and their management alike are buried by an avalanche of information, data, and IP management issues that outdated DDM, proprietary solutions and retrofitted software development systems simply cannot address,” said Simon Butler, CEO of Methodics. “With the latest release of our SoC Management Platform, we have taken a holistic and SoC-centric approach to improving efficiency and visibility and encouraging best practices at both the enterprise and workspace levels. Our solution provides a virtual dashboard to manage critical information such as IP availability, revisions and usage; cataloging and BOM’s; and group-level coordination and analysis of important design and tool data.”
ProjectIC for enterprise information management
ProjectIC debuted at last year’s Design Automation Conference and won accolades for its project-level management capabilities. It provides a unified system for managing design data, tracking project activity and delivering project IP to remote design sites. Libraries can be maintained globally and component IP’s are tracked across the enterprise giving better visibility on how IP is being used. Project data can be sourced from multiple repositories with different DM systems (Perforce, Subversion, ClearCase and Git supported today).
The new release features several enhancements, including the ability to harvest meta-information on IP, storing and displaying it for easy analysis. For example power, speed, timing and other information can be measured and registered in the ProjectIC SQL database and reports generated showing the state (or quality) of individual IP components or across the entire SoC .
Other enhancements include an enhanced Jira/Trac defect tracking interface for managing defects across the SoC BOM. Tickets can be listed, filtered and updated from a command line client or the BuildIC GUI and, in the case of Jira/Perforce, the p4jobs integration allows for easy consolidation of defects and changelists. ProjectIC also includes a new Hudson continuous build integration for IP verification and promotion which ensures the quality of individual IP’s can be tracked in ProjectIC and automatically rolled for integration at the SoC level.
BuildIC improves performance, efficiency of IP management
Within ProjectIC, BuildIC is a high-performance IP integration engine that allows development teams to compile, organize and integrate IP workspaces. BuildIC is a multi-threaded application that can assemble SoC workspaces in parallel across a compute farm, expediting the delivery of IP to user locations. It improves performance time to access data updates by orders of magnitude, even for remote design centers. It is particularly useful for multi-site design environments to help track IP use and revisions, ensuring consistent data is used project-wide.
With BuildIC, workspaces can be created in seconds, independent of size. Best practices are encouraged through project templates and associated constructor rules, and the system optimizes workspace creation and management based on context. BuildIC utilizes best practices for optimizing access time, disk utilization and network traffic.
Users can fetch a specific BOM as defined in the catalog, and they can upload the state of their workspace to the catalog as a new BOM. Team members can compare their workspace to any BOM in the catalog so they can decide if the changes are right for their needs. BuildIC automatically tracks IP usage ensuring IP users will be notified if a problem is discovered.
BuildIC includes both a rich command line client and an intuitive GUI to accommodate both software and hardware-centric design environments. From the command line all aspects of the project can be interrogated and reported; release labels, branches and tags can be created with no expert knowledge of the target DM system required and Jira/Trac/Bugzilla tickets can be listed, filtered and closed automatically as part of a IP release. In the GUI users can see the state of their SoC integration with color-coded IP tabs and BOM’s. Users may browse defects by IP or by project.
DAC – Booth 2921
Methodics is showing its new ProjectIC SoC Management Platform including the ProjectIC SoC Portal and the BuildIC SoC Integration Engine, as well as its VersIC tools and modules, in its booth (#2921) at the Design Automation Conference at the San Diego Convention Center, California.
About Methodics LLC
Methodics is a leading provider of design data management (DM) tools for integrated circuits. Methodics’ SoC Management Platform integrates industry-standard software configuration management (SCM) tools, such as the Perforce® and Subversion® version control systems into the hardware design environment, along with enterprise and client-level modules that leverage the platform to provide a higher, more efficient global collaboration experience. The privately held company has offices in the USA, Europe and Asia. For further information, visit www.methodics-da.com.
