The live DAC'22 Troublemakers Panel


 Cooley: Dean.  When you were first on my Troublemakers panel 14 years ago,
         back in 2008 at DVCon you talked about design data management.

         And I yawned.

         IC Manage GDP was competing against DesignSync and Cliosoft.

         Doesn't everyone already have a DDM tool and aren't you just like 
         in a dead space?  Why are you here?

         [laughter]

   Dean: First, as we all know, both the EDA market and the semiconductor
         market are both growing. 

         Second, the DDM -- design data management market -- has also 
         expanded significantly.  

         Back in 2008, we were mostly addressing analog design data issues
         and a little bit of analog reuse design data issues.  

         IC Manage has since expanded into the digital realm.  Almost every chip
         taped out is now DDM manage on both the digital and analog side. 
         So, the overall DDM market has grown quite a bit.

         IP Reuse has become huge as a key component of chip design.

         To keep winning and beating out those other names you mentioned, 
         we've had to really drive our IC Manage tool forward.  

      2008 - it was 10's to 100's gigabytes of analog design data 
      2022 - it's now 1's to 10's terabytes of analog and/or digital design data

         IC Manage has always been the fastest tool for DDM that's been out
         there -- but now we're a 100x faster with a new architecture 
         underlying our DDM tool.  

         We also scale to multi-site, and with the geopolitical stuff, DDM 
         has gotten quite complicated with access.

 Cooley: What do you mean?

   Dean: A lot of our DDM customers have a lot of restrictions on what
         portions, what employees, and what countries can access what
         data and what they can see.

 Cooley: Oh wow.  Is that on a per-employee basis, or a per-site basis?

   Dean: It depends on the customer.  Each customer does it differently.  

 Cooley: Wow.  Okay.  

  [ EDITOR'S NOTE: For example, Infineon, a known IC Manage customer, has major
    chip design RnD divisions in San Jose CA, Kawasaki Japan, Munich Germany,
    Lexington KY, Bangalore India, Villach Austria, and Austin TX.

    So to honor U.S. export laws, the IC Manage DDM SW lets non-U.S. divisions
    only access a limited subset of the IP stored on U.S. sites.  Or only the
    microwave engineers can access microwave IP.  Or only specific PnR engineers
    can access certain tuned custom libs.  Lots of policies to enforce! - John ] 

   Dean: Yes, it's a big issue.  

         And, IC Manage has had to expand the number of design flows that
         we support.  The number of design flows and design methodologies
         out there is far-reaching.

         Covering all of them in a single DDM tool is important; especially
         when you get into large organizations that might be running large 
         design flows.

  [ EDITOR'S NOTE: For example, big monster companies like Intel and Apple
    and AMD are famous for acquiring dozens (to 100's if you count totals
    over decades) of smaller specialized chip design companies and letting
    most of them run as-is with their own internal design flows.

    That is, Intel/AMD/Apple wisely do NOT try to forcibly integrate each
    acquired sub-company's design flow into one universal design flow;
    because that usually trashes how these acquired sub-companies design
    their killer chips.

    Instead Apple/Intel/AMD lets each acquired sub-company keep running
    whatever unique design flow they had all along -- BUT because the
    acquired all each report back to their AMD/Apple/Intel mothership;
    they often share their designs and flows with each other -- making it
    one mother of a monster design data mananagement headache!  - John ]

   Dean: DDM if you think about it really drives the whole workflow.  All 
         your EDA tools are launched off a data set pulled from your DDM
         system.  All your regression-test-update pulls the data from your
         DDM system and launch.  

         All of that has made IC Manage kind of the core of both their
         analog and digital design flows for the majority of our customers.

         So, it's good.

         Our customers have also now come to us to ask for assistance to
         use the cloud -- so they can run their flows in the cloud.

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