by Bryon D Beilman
There are quite a few areas that can really make a difference to the success of high performance semiconductor design and simulation environment. This blog will be short and contain a brief mention of those tools that we continually find add real value to companies that want their employees focusing on the design of the intellectual property and not focused on what they can do to work around limitations in their IT environment.
Over time, I will dig more into these tools and techniques and offer them as a white paper to those who want more detail. In general, here are the things that I feel are important and by order of their impact.
- Fast, centralized and reliable NAS
- Consistently configured and integrated tools
- A fast server farm or minimally a collection of computers that can compute quickly
- A modular approach to invoking different projects or tools
- A batch submission environment (esp a Grid)
- Version Control and a centralized repository
- Separation of Design data with transient simulation and verification files
- A bug and issue tracking system
- Collaboration tools including Mail servers, Document sharing, Wiki's and web based monitoring
- Doing all the above using an architecture that scales and does not have to be redone to handle your success.
Each one of these could support it's own blog and knowing how to configure each one and to make an environment work smoothly is important and what iuvo Technologies does every day. Is your environment an asset, liability or better yet is it a competitive advantage to your company.