( DAC 09 Item 12 ) ---------------------------------------------- [12/11/09]
Subject: IC Manage, Cliosoft, and MethodICs
MONEY & LOVE: For such a boring area as "Design Management", or as their
compulsive marketing people like to say, "Design Data Management", I got a
surprising number of customer responses on IC Manage. They seem to have a
loyal (albeit "odd") following. Go figure.
Plus ya gotta love the blood and gore watching little IC Manage fight it
out with big daddy Dassault (Synchronicity) DesignSync:
ESNUG 483 #5: We swapped Dassault DesignSync for IC Manage
But most of all, ya gotta extra love how ClioSoft effectively "bought" the
customer love for $100 per head at this most recent DAC! You go, Clio!
What were the 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 INTERESTING specific tools that
you saw at DAC this year? WHY where they interesting to you?
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I would also like to thank ClioSoft for their version of Texas hold'em.
They had 7 people play several rounds of poker and the one with the most
chips at the end, won $100 cash. Because they didn't increase the size
of the blinds (antes), as the game progressed, this was the quickest
$100 I ever made.
- Edward Paluch of Paluch & Associates, Inc.
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Cliosoft: Impressed! Well prepared and compared to the reviews I read
last year, they surprised me. Their demo was good and easy
to understand and Poker was the BEST PART. :)
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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My thoughts on IC Manage: it's a great idea and I believe we could benefit
from something along these lines. At the same time, my impression is that
the tool assumes a high degree of linearity in a design process. My hunch
is that a great deal of work would be needed to have it easily handle all
of the contingencies and work models that our projects require: many
levels of branches, multiple steppings in flight at once, and nested
repositories to name a few. We have a highly distributed work model and
tend to find centralized repository systems like IC Mange restrictive.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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IC Manage made perfect sense for us because we were already using Perforce
for managing layout data. So a transition to IC Manage was seamless. I
like IC Manage's philosophy of keeping things simple for the user. There
is no need to write any scripts as all the tasks were handled by the tool.
Their ability to maintain several active release streams concurrently and
team collaboration across multiple sites is sweet.
- Vissu Burela of Broadcom
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From the Global Design Platform (GDP) demo it looked like IC Manage had no
trouble transferring large files and large numbers of small files across
the network. Some of the new stuff IC Manage showed at DAC was:
- A GUI to control user access to the parts of your repository
- Foreign configuration support for IP package reuse (helpful)
- Configuration based cloning for data backup
- support for Mac OS X clients
IC Manage showed me their Cadence interface. It looked easy to manage
Virtuoso files from the Library Manager. Check in/out was fast, etc.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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The presentation IC Manage gave at DAC introduced to us a new GUI they
had to help enter and manage access permissions. One of the key aspects
of the tool was that it could check the collective behavior of the
entered permissions to help ensure they performed as intended. This
seemed to be valuable since the only other way to find problems in the
set-up of permissions would apparently be to have users discover them.
Users may report permissions that were denied to them, but they may not
notice nor realize they had permissions they were not supposed to have.
This new GUI helps an administrator verify that he had setup permissions
correctly.
- [ An Anon Engineer ]
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Our concern with IC Manage has been how to get support/maintenance in
Northern Europe, which is more important for their kind of product than
most other products. Our main concern was not support for the tools,
but rather the hardware platform which is qualified by IC Manage. We
need a make/model where we can get 4 hour or better response time
locally. That should be solved now.
- Frank Berntsen of Nordic Semiconductor
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I wanted to put in for my Best of DAC. There is a small company called
MethodICs which does design management solutions. They are innovating a
new tool which goes beyond simple design management. In ReviewIC, the
idea is to bundle other forms of data as well as communication with the
standard schematic and layout. You can attach simulation results, graphs,
spreadsheets and highlight parts of the layout and schematic that may have
issues or concerns. You can also send messages to other people who are
part of the review via the tool. When they pull up the review, all of the
necessary data is available. This can help greatly with cross-site
communication and ensuring that all issues are documented and taken care
of. With this, engineers and managers can have a cohesive mechanism to
manage and archive all of the disparate data which are part of design.
- Dimitri Argyres of NetLogic Microsystems
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