Heard at DAC: Is workflow automation the next frontier for EDA?

By _EDN Practical Chip Design

June 23, 2010

Three exhibitors on the show floor at DAC this year stood out from the crowd-not for their huge booths or the novelty of their new products, but simply by being so different from the mainstream of EDA thinking. The three were Dassault Systemes ENOVIA, IBM Software Group, and Methodics. Each is involved, in one way or another, with Product Lifecycle Management. PLM plays a growing role in enterprise operations generally, and as the scale of IC design efforts increases, like it or not PLM probably lies in the future for many chip design teams.

But what is it? PLM is one of those grand terms so capacious that it risks conveying nothing at all. But to the IC design profession it has some specific meanings. One-perhaps the first to be automated in the EDA world-is simply version control. A second aspect is workflow management: tracking data sets, tasks, and outcomes through an organization as the project progresses. Combine these and season with message-tracking, conferencing, and perhaps a Wiki, and you get an inter-team collaboration platform.

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