Risk on the Rise

By Steve Glaser, Cadence Design Systems -- Electronic News, 3/27/2006

Electronics devices are woven into the fabric of our daily lives. Whether we’re talking on the latest cell phone, entertaining our kids with the newest game console, or taking a Sunday drive, electronics and the systems and chips that make up these phones, games and automobiles are all around us. Leading companies producing these products face huge amounts of product delivery risk -- both monetary and market based.

We’re talking serious, market-pounding risk for those developing the latest cell phones, game consoles, or navigation systems in our cars. Companies need to trust that the products they go to market with will be on schedule and bug free -- the costs are too high and the competition is too fierce.

The call is going out for a verification process that addresses these risks in design by adding management, automation and metrics that can be tracked, measured and deployed enterprise wide.

Leading Indicators: Metrics are Essential

Without metrics and the ability to manage to the check points they provide, companies are faced with serious problems. How does a management team predict the number of resources they will need -- which includes both compute and human resources? Without reliable metrics measured against an original spec, the team’s ability to predict a planned tape out varies widely. How much work remains? What is the status of the simulation runs? Have we covered all possible block and system bugs or potential failures? The answer to these questions is usually “no” unless a process that includes managed metrics is adopted.

So how do companies address these risks? The first step is by moving to enterprise wide verification solutions that promote and overall verification process with the ability to optimize and plan, and increases productivity, predictability and quality. It sounds like a mouthful but, there is a lot of meaning behind it.

Companies are becoming global and specialized due to complexities and specialization. You may have design teams in Europe working on a specific block being verified by engineers in India and targeted to be used in a complete system by architects in North America. In other words, we are seeing highly specialized teams that need common infrastructure and analysis capabilities. The need for centralized databases that each of these groups and each specialist can tap into and manage is critical. The ability to measure various forms of coverage data, utilized hardware for performance, automate and consolidate simulation runs and regressions, and scale with the project is essential. You can only imagine the inefficiencies and inability to meet schedules that would creep into the process without metrics and central databases. Metrics built into the plan and measured within the process are crucial, and there are software management solutions today that can manage these sorts of tasks.

To add to this global web of communication, you have various teams working for specific goals that may differ at the block, chip or system level. These layers need to be tracked and managed and scanned for reuse opportunities that may take the place of certain custom pieces of the design. This, too, will need to be tracked and measure within the context of the entire system. These metrics are very useful to the overall project manager and his broader management team and help managers make educated decisions within the context of the entire job.

As we’ve illustrated, the risks are high for those design teams working to deliver that next hot gadget or electronic devices. And the need to shift to metric based philosophies that lean on the expertise of EDA companies that can deliver methodology built on proven best practice is clear. The path to success includes using management solutions to track overall metrics against a workable plan. The result will prove that a true set of best practices can be deployed across geographically diverse and specialized teams. Solutions backed with automation across an entire enterprise that directly relieves some of the risks these companies take on every day.

Steve Glaser is VP of marketing for the verification division at Cadence Design Systems Inc.