Often a software configuration management system already in use in the company, such as IBM's ClearCase, Perforce or public domain CVS, is adopted for managing design data. This may work for purely front end digital design flows, which are similar to software development, but is generally unsuitable for other flows such as analog or custom IC design.

The IC design data and development process is different from software data and development in several ways:

• Users are working with graphical objects, such as schematics or layout, and at higher abstraction levels, such as libraries and cells, and are not necessarily aware of the physical files that store the data. Design tools create large number of design data files with complex correlation between them as well as temporary run files. Designers cannot be expected to wade through this vast collection of files and make sense of it.
• The relationship between the design objects that the engineer is working with and the physical files used to store the data is often one to many, and changing. For instance, a designer using Cadence's Virtuoso Custom IC or Mentor's ICstudio thinks of libraries, cells and views. The design data for each cell-view is saved in multiple files. To maintain the integrity of the design object, the collection of files that make up the design object should be treated as a single co-managed set.
• The size of design data is much larger than software source files. There are many more files and a high percentage of them are large binary files.
• A design flow has several complex tools, often from different vendors. Each tool organizes data files in a different way.

Managing design data across the entire flow requires a set of capabilities not usually found in software configuration management systems. To address the unique requirements of hardware design engineers, especially those using graphical tools, hardware design data management (DM) vendors have created custom integrations, or what can be thought of as connectors or adaptors, for popular design tools. Design flows such as Cadence Virtuoso, Synopsys Milkyway, Mentor ICstudio, Silicon Canvas Laker, Mentor HDLdesigner, etc. are supported by one or more DM vendors.

These custom DM adaptors provide a well-integrated solution to manage design data from specific tools. However, this approach has some severe limitations:

• Each adaptor must be hand-crafted, which takes considerable time and resources and severely limits the number of design tools that can be supported by DM vendors.
• Development of custom adaptors requires close cooperation between the DM vendor and the design tool vendor. Given the number of design tools on the market, matching priorities and time makes such partnerships tricky.

To manage data from a variety of design tools and leverage the best practices of design data management throughout the entire design cycle, we need a "Swiss Army Knife" of DM adaptors. We need a DM adaptor that can be quickly configured to manage design data from practically any design tool.

Such a "universal" design data management adaptor would bring DM to the vast majority of design tools that currently have no DM capability. Imagine the productivity uptick if design teams were able to manage ALL design data, whether it is from Cadence Virtuoso, Agilent ADS, Mentor DxDesigner, a PCB editor, a text editor or even an in-house layout editor in the same DM system.

An administrator should be able to work with someone who has knowledge of the design data produced by a given tool to quickly and easily create the set of rules required to make a DM system aware of the design tool. We have rule-based tools throughout EDA; why not here, where design data from concept to tape-out is touched by worldwide teams? Collaboration at every step of the design cycle would be made easier and design data from all tools would become manageable.