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EEs Need IT for EDA Now, more than ever, electrical engineers require information technology to manage their electronic design automation infrastructure. by Dennis Ray Harmon

In the past, the lack of a comprehensive team-based design and process information management infrastructure for electronic design has had a negative effect on productivity. Today, information technology (IT) is used by several organizational disciplines to improve productivity.

Yet it is ironic that the electronics industry that enabled the information revolution has not taken fuller advantage of IT to improve its own productivity. The rapid growth in the use of IT--the Internet, corporate intranets, decentralized client/server computing environments--has dramatically changed the ways in which organizations manage and disseminate computer-based information. Work group interactions were once office-centered and characterized by a static, same time, same place information exchange paradigm. Today, they are increasingly taking place between geographically dispersed "virtual offices." This shift in the complexion of the workplace is compounding difficulties associated with managing information within and across organizational and geographical boundaries. Nowhere is this more prevalent than in design organizations within the electronics industry.

Over the past two decades, advances in EDA enabled electronic design teams to develop increasingly sophisticated and complex products. High-level design methods have come at the expense of explosive increases in the amount of design information that must be managed.

Additionally, widespread corporate initiatives to downsize and improve efficiencies, coupled with shrinking design cycles, have resulted in a demand for changes in the way design teams work. A shift toward concurrent, team-based approaches has taken place, in which large designs are hierarchically decomposed into functional blocks and developed by teams. This new way of working requires the ability to automate design process tasks and provide unobtrusive ways of allowing designers to communicate and share design information, as well as track design changes and manage the design process.

EDA vendors foster increases in designer productivity through the development of automation tools. Yet secondary importance has been placed on the capabilities needed to manage the design environment. Complicating the issue of design environment management is the wide-scale adoption of design processes which employ "best-in-class" design tools from multiple EDA vendors. While EDA standards for design description and tool interoperability have eased problems with tool connectivity, a lack of standards for how electronic design information is stored, accessed, distributed, tracked, and shared makes design environment management difficult and time consuming.

The current lack of an EDA-independent design management groupware infrastructure will continue to limit the productivity gains that might otherwise have been achieved through the adoption of new design methods and tools. The inability of electronic design engineering organizations to efficiently manage and reuse design and information is adversely effecting their ability to meet time-to-market goals and corporate initiatives to improve quality. It's time for the electronics industry to fully reap the benefits of IT.

Dennis Ray Harmon is the president of Synchronicity Inc. (Boston, Massachusetts).

To voice an opinion on this or any Integrated System Design article, please e-mail your message to michael@isdmag.com.

integrated system design  December 1996