Design teams today place a lot of emphasis on making each designer more productive. For example, a design team may abandon their current simulator and invest in a new simulator that is twice as fast. It's easy to quantify this and subsequently easy to justify the investment in dollars and training. Consequently, EDA technology has focused on designer productivity, resulting in significant breakthroughs that lead to larger designs being completed in shorter time. The ability, however, to put an entire system on a chip and shrinking market windows continue to place severe demands on design teams.

To cope with this problem, hardware design teams are getting larger and hardware and software are being developed concurrently. The amount of data and the number of files are exploding. As a result, a significant portion of a designer's time is now spent in coordinating and communicating with other members of the team. Any miscommunication can be costly. For example, if you happen to pick the wrong set of files, then you'll have to rerun your simulations. You may lose a day or more just waiting for a new set of simulation results.

As the team size grows, the time spent in coordination increases - so does the probability of errors due to miscommunication. The cost of any error gets multiplied because it affects other members of the team. This is further accentuated if the team members are geographically dispersed across different time zones. Therefore, it's imperative for a project leader to focus on improving communication and implementing a robust, reliable set of tools and processes. Though the improvement in productivity is difficult to quantify, it's still clear that it will pay rich dividends in productivity and - even more importantly - in quality. Thus, project leaders must constantly review processes and work to improve them.

Effective management of data is an important key to improving collaboration. Whether engineers are at the same site or spread over multiple geographically locations, they must be able to access design data reliably and communicate effortlessly.

Engineers in the team should be able to work concurrently on different aspects of the same design. For example, some members of the team may be working on synthesis and timing issues while others may be adding new functionality. It's no longer feasible for all the members of the team to be working on the latest revisions of all the files. Team members should be able get the correct set of revisions of files, easily and reliably, to perform their task.

A real design consists of many thousands of files spread over many directories. Not only are files being modified, but new files are also added or deleted, and directories may get completely reorganized. To identify or correct a problem, it's quite likely that you will have to recreate a previous configuration of the project. To recreate it exactly, you need a consistent set of revisions and you also need to have all the right files in the correct places. In other words, you must not only maintain a revision history of each file but also - just as importantly - a revision history of the directory structure of your project.

Communication of changes, progress, and status of the project are equally essential to streamline development. Meetings and emails are very poor means for this constant communication. In fact, automatically generated emails are effective only in filling up your mailbox. Your data management tools and processes must provide non-intrusive communication to the team members and raise the level of visibility into the project. Project leaders should be able to monitor the progress of the project and take corrective action before it's too late. Increasing the level of awareness automatically reduces errors, which directly translates into high-quality products delivered on schedule.

The success of a project hinges on how efficiently the entire team works together. Project leaders must focus on improving the productivity of the whole team by effectively managing data, streamlining design flow, and improving communication. But make sure that the tools and methods employed are easy to use. Otherwise, the gains in productivity may easily be negated by training and administration costs.

Srinath Anantharaman is the president of Cliosoft, Inc. - a company he founded in 1997. He has over seventeen years of experience in the EDA industry. He was previously a partner at Proxy Modeling - a consulting company focused on high level design and methodology.