IC Manage Announces Global Design Platform (GDP) for Scalable, Collaborative IC Design

LOS GATOS, Calif. – April 23, 2007 – IC Manage today announced its Global Design Platform (GDP), the first data management solution to offer design assembly, derivative management, and real-time worldwide delivery. Utilizing the Perforce engine, IC Manage GDP also includes IT integration for hot backup, high availability, and disaster recovery for 24x7 enterprise availability, extending IC Manage’s existing high performance revision control, configuration management and multi-site collaboration capabilities.

IC Manage GDP is the only IC design management system with the following technology foundation:

• Transaction-based for real-time worldwide delivery

• Message queuing architecture with atomic transactions for performance and data reliability

• Streaming TCP for performance approaching wire speed across long latency networks

IC Manage GDP enables companies to efficiently manage, locate, assemble and reuse design data and IP across the enterprise during all phases of the design process. Its next generation architecture delivers superior performance, reliability, and scalability when compared with traditional data management systems based on 1980’s RCS technology. IC Manage’s relational database and server side meta-data model provide a powerful query based solution to eliminate the problem of gathering and reporting information stored in globally dispersed client workspaces.

“A design team’s ability to collaborate efficiently across a global network throughout the design process is vital to meeting their project goals,” said Dean Drako, IC Manage’s president and chief executive officer. “With today’s dramatic increase in data volume, only a transaction-based approach with derivative tracking will let companies achieve around-the-clock, high reliability, design collaboration efficiencies.”

Data Management Challenges
Because of increased data set sizes across multiple sites, IC designs now require significantly more infrastructure than conventional data management systems provide. Project management can be expected to make up 20 to 25 percent of design costs at 65-nm, almost double the costs at 90 nm.  


With current methods, designers and design groups:

• Face lengthy tagging times, protracted check-in and check-out times

• Are unable to easily assemble and reuse existing components without complex scripting

• Encounter corruption from glitches during data transfers over global networks, caused by file-by-file transfer operations

• Experience significant challenges sharing collateral when they use separate configuration management systems for hardware and software development

From a global design perspective, designs groups in different geographic regions face the following problems:

• Inability to handle large binary objects quickly

• Inability to efficiently combine data from multiple sites

• Designers (worldwide) can be locked out during back-ups

• Disaster recovery plan difficult to implement

IC Manage Global Design Platform:  Efficient, Scalable, Multi-Site Design
IC Manage Global Design Platform is a reliable, scalable, high performance, multi-site design management system. It contains the following key capabilities:

1. Derivative Management. IC Manage GDP allows design managers to track component usage across both revision space and derivative space. When creating new derivatives, GDP tracks the bi-directional relationships between 'parent and child’. Both sources and targets are recorded, and changes can automatically be propagated in either direction by using meta-data records. In contrast, with conventional RCS-style branching, the designers must diff, or re-work the same block changes in multiple places.

2. Design Assembly. IC Manage facilitates a powerful component-based model that provides project managers with the ability to easily mix, match and reuse components and IP blocks developed at any site in the enterprise with no scripting.

3. Multi-Site Content Delivery. IC Manage GDP offers a unique real-time content delivery mechanism as part of its multi-site design collaboration support. Design teams can push or pull common data, such as process design kits (PDK’s) and internal and external IP to any site with no delay. The content delivery architecture minimizes bandwidth usage by ensuring only one copy of a particular version is sent over the WAN. IC Manage GDP’s stateless caching mechanism prevents incorrect data from being delivered to the remote site in the event of network disconnects or other errors. Since IC Manage GDP is entirely change-driven, it can automatically detect and propagate the appropriate content for any workspace in a highly reliable and maintenance-free manner.

The above capabilities of IC Manage GDP add to IC Manage’s existing ultra performance release management, revision control, defect tracking, and multi-site collaboration capabilities.  With IC Manage’s release management, release states are implicit for all versions in the change-based architecture and are fully incremental, in direct contrast to explicit, tag-based approaches. With cross-coupled defect tracking, IC Manage GDP allows designers to synchronize their workspace to the exact state when the bug was reported, fixed or verified. Additionally, because IC Manage GDP is built on Perforce, an industry standard software configuration management (SCM) system, both hardware and software developers can use the same unified configuration management system to develop and reuse collateral.

IT Infrastructure Compatibility: Non-stop Data Replication

IC Manage’s GDP includes IT integration for hot backup, high availability, and disaster recovery. This integration provides global design teams data availability on demand and near real-time replication for the true non-stop enterprise availability needed for today’s around-the-clock design efforts.

1. Global Scalability. IC Manage GDP ensures that data is available in all locations on demand.

2. Storage Management. IC Manage GDP allows managers to reduce costs through a tiered storage mechanism.

3. Disaster Recovery. IC Manage’s GDP supports redundant configurations with multiple peers in different regions across the WAN. In the event of a total loss scenario in the local data center, the remote data center can immediately take over operation without the need for recovery from tape or other archive.

4. High Availability. High availability, or automatic failover, via peer-to-peer redundant configurations, allows one server to automatically take over from the other in the event of hardware or other failures.

5. Back-up Integration. With hot backup, the design database is not required to be in a quiescent state for it to be backed up, providing non-stop availability of the repository across multiple time zones without purchasing special hardware or software.

Leading Semiconductor Companies Select GDP

IC Manage’s GDP is in production use by AMD, Cambridge Silicon Radio, National Semiconductor, NVIDIA, Rambus, and SanDisk.  

Availability

GDP is available today on Linux™, Solaris™ and Windows™.

About IC Manage

IC Manage provides next generation design management solutions for IC design, enabling companies to efficiently and reliably manage single and multi-site design efforts. IC Manage's Global Design Platform (GDP) – utilizing the Perforce engine - is the first solution to offer design assembly, derivative management and content delivery in addition to scalable, ultra performance revision control, release and configuration management. GDP includes IT infrastructure integration for hot backup, high availability and disaster recovery for true 24x7 enterprise availability. IC Manage is headquartered at 101 Church St., Los Gatos, CA 95030. For more information, visit us at www.icmanage.com or see us at DAC 2007 in San Diego, CA in booth 6977.