Disaggregation of the IC and system design chain toward a specialty model has included a growing reliance on outsourcing. That has created an opportunity for developers of advanced tool suites to field design environments in which the "best of the best"--from anywhere around the globe--can be assembled for round-the-clock development of fully optimized designs.

Such an environment holds obvious appeal for OEMs haunted by the triple demons of narrowing time-to-market windows, tightening cost constraints and ever-rising performance requirements. But they must tread carefully, as new design constraints will now come to the fore. Global design efforts must factor in such variables as design security vulnerabilities; time zone and cultural differences; political and infrastructure vagaries; and the possibility that proj- ect goals, objectives and data will be "lost in translation."

The good news is that as more advanced tools become available for global design and more development teams test the waters, a knowledge base is being built that lets newcomers learn from their predecessors' mistakes and successes.

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While global design is not a new concept--indeed, it has been practiced for many years-- the economic downturn has added a twist. With engineering unemployment rising--to a record 8.6 percent in the second quarter in the United States alone, according to government data--more engineers are becoming "gig" workers, contracting out their skills, either in- dividually or as members of specialized teams, to the highest bidders.

"The chip industry is disaggregating into special areas that then link into partners that can help you pull [a project] together," said Shiv Sikand, founder and vice president of engineering at IC Manage Inc. The company provides the IC Manage design content management system.

The "freeing up" of global engineering talent is complemented by an increased tendency for companies to outsource their design needs. According to the "2009 Embedded Market Study" conducted by TechInsights (publisher of EE Times), the percentage of engineers who have been personally involved in an embedded development project that was fully or partially outsourced has risen steadily over the past three years, from 39 percent in 2007 to 43 percent in 2008 and an estimated 48 percent this year. Among the projects outsourced this year, 64 percent went to firms in India, up from 51 percent in 2008, and 33 percent went to firms in China, up from 13 percent in 2008. Next came western Europe, eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.

Indeed, many Indian outsource houses report they are already bouncing back from the downturn. The irony is that their increased business is partly a result of their clients' continued efforts to regain profitability by cutting costs.

In late July, The Wall Street Journal reported that Wipro Ltd. had seen a 12 percent rise in profit, to $209.8 million, in its June-ended fiscal first quarter. Total revenue rose 5 percent, according to the Journal report, which also noted that Wipro had been the third major Indian software exporter to beat recent market estimates.

Internal outsourcing (wherein a company borrows design cycles from its team members around the globe) continues to be practiced, said IC Manage's Sikand, but external outsourcing is becoming increasingly common, particularly in certain areas of expertise. One case in point with which Sikand is familiar is a design group in Europe that is expert in RF interference. The group interfaces with system vendors using the IC Manage platform.

Extrapolating from the current outsourcing trend, Sikand foresees an ironic turn of events in which fast-growing offshore outsourcing specialists, in order to meet their staffing requirements, resort to "reverse outsourcing," hiring U.S. and European engineers who have lost their jobs to external outsourcing contractors.

Whether a job is "outsourced" to a remote internal team, contracted out to an offshore firm or awarded to a gig engineer who has hung a virtual shingle, there are a number of ground rules and "gotchas" that the project manager must consider. The concerns range from location and infrastructure to technical definitions and the mutual understanding of project objectives and terms.

Few companies know more about dealing with globally distributed design teams than EDA specialist Synopsys does. According to Glenn Dukes, vice president of professional services, the company works with more than 250 consultants around the globe, in locales ranging from Synopys' well-publicized Dubai Circuit Design Center to cities in eastern Europe, India, North America and Taiwan.

Most of the contracted consultants work with Synopsys customers on design prototyping and tapeout.

Synopsys chose Munich, Germany, as a regional hub primarily because of the city's infrastructure support, Dukes said. "You can win anywhere if you have reliable power and QoS [Internet quality-of-service]," said Dukes.

On the other hand, the company set up an operation in China, Dukes said, but "we had issues with QoS, as well as data import/export [laws], so we [moved to] Taiwan instead."

Time zone differences and infrastructure disparities are not the only "geographical" variables that figure into global design projects; cultural considerations also loom large. For example, "in India, it may be bad to vocally voice a concern," said Dukes. He recalled a project that had experienced a hiccup when groups in Japan, China and Taiwan clashed over a cultural issue, but he noted that all parties had managed to put their differences aside. "The key [was] to make sure politics" didn't figure into the discussion and get in the way of achieving the project's goals, he said.

Communication is another hurdle when multinational teams are assembled. The effort to keep everyone on the same page starts with the kickoff meeting and continues throughout the project. "Program management is so critical," said Dukes. Everyone involved with the project must be clear on its goals, objectives, measures for assessing progress and terms.

Face-to-face meetings could be in order not just at the outset of the project, but also at various waypoints toward its conclusion. Videoconferencing might not cut it for critical design reviews or a debate about a nonstandard interface. When "hard discussions [are needed] and tough collaborative decisions need to be made," call a meeting, Dukes said. "You have to get beyond information [transfer] into [true] understanding."

Given all the messy "place" and "people" issues involved in global design projects, you'd think the technical stuff would be the easy part. Think again.

"You need to make sure [everyone is] talking about the same thing," said Sikand.

For example, engineers from different backgrounds have different ways of structuring data directories. "Most engineers think about the overall design structure, so we abstract the data from the structure so that the engineer doesn't have to think about [the data directories]," Sikand said. "We have a way [in IC Manage's content management system] of 'projecting' a directory view."

Indeed, the ability to make predictions and track revisions is at the heart of the advanced development platforms that promise to help teams avoid data misinterpretation and inconsistencies.

"You need to be able to bind data flows and be able to bind to actual events that occur," said Sikand. "You also need to be able to revert to prior iterations in relation to the rest of the [global team's] design, and fix timing issues, so when you run regression it shows what happened."

For Synopsys' Dukes, "the key to success is standardization," especially in the context of databases and communications infrastructure.

Runtime access and control are also critical and are a key component of Synopsys' Lynx Design System, Dukes said. "You can visually see problems as individual steps complete, so managers and engineers can see where there are convergence and timing issues. Everyone on the workflow sees the same data."

Consistency of data viewing, in real-time, has changed the landscape, said Dukes. "Transparency really helps build trust. We can see progress against goals and where the problems are."

The tools also handle design data security, including access control. For example, Sikand said, when working with gig engineers, the project manager can "make sure they can only see the parts [of the design] they're working on."