Managers Move Into The Hot Seat
By Ed Sperling
If the new releases of Synopsys’ Ly nx environment and Mentor Graphics’s Calibre are any indication, managers should probably take note. The tool automatically gathers information for power, timing and area—everything you’d expect from a tool of this sort—but it also provides what it calls a management cockpit.
Synopsys’ management cockpit and Mentor’s dashboard allow upper management to see what’s happening throughout the design process and to track progress. And while that may be useful from an efficiency perspective, both products also move the blame up a few notches. If something goes wrong, the top managers can no longer claim ignorance. They have all the information they need for a detailed understanding of a design’s progress.
It also means that upper management will require at least some expertise to use these kinds of tools effectively. A business background is great for understanding operating expenses and sales, but a technical background will be essential for making sure the job gets done. And in public companies, it will be much tougher to hide behind the paneled walls of the C-suite and claim incompetence from below.
“Ly nx provides visibility across a design flow with its management cockpit, roughly the way economic data has been added inside many corporations at the enterprise level,” said Ganesh Ramamoorthy, an analyst at Gartner. “There will be more scrutiny from team manager all the way up to the CEO/CFO with this kind of data. Given the current economic conditions it is only natural that engineering teams will come under more scrutiny in terms of their productivity levels. So whether they like it or not, one way or the other, management will try and push tool such as these to get a better grip on design tape outs and resource utilization.”
Likewise, Calibre’s focus on design for manufacturing can zero in on which engineers are getting the best yield from the foundries. “You can analyze different design groups and determine their yield,” said Jeff Wilson, Calibre DFM marketing manager. But while that tool may be good for managers’ ability to get a good look at what’s going on inside an engineering group, it will be tougher to push the blame off to someone else.
Ramamoorthy believes that, like most advances in existing tools, these changes will make engineers more effective. But whether they actually improve innovation now that someone is watching over them is uncharted water.
“Tools such as these basically make engineers life easier,” Ramamoorthy said. “But innovation is not something that can happen just because these tools are now available. Engineers were innovative when these tools where not there within the given constraints. With these tools now at their disposal, ultimately, they will have more time to innovate. But then who ultimately innovates is the million-dollar question.”
At the very least, it will increase visibility in both directions.
Tags: business, management, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys
March 19th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Some other platforms that support data fusion and project health/status for multi-vendor tool flows are Runtime Design’s VoV (http://www.rtda.com/) and the Achilles (http://www.achillestest.com) DV Notebook.
An SOC project today represents millions to tens of millions of dollars of expense risk alone (revenue and opportunity cost add another zero or two). We see the design methodology moving from a single path or flow to a tree-structured exploration of the design and verification space in leading edge design teams as they continue to leverage higher ratios of processors (and licenses) to headcount.
This flood of data can overwhelm a team’s ability to grep log files or keep a status list in an Excel spreadsheet. Just the time involved in developing and verifying a PowerPoint status slide may put you a few days out of sync: this can make for a painful project review when questions like “where are we and when will we be done” are asked with some insistence.