Enabling Global Collaboration with ReviewIC
Today's global design teams face many challenges to effective collaboration. Time differences, language barriers and cultural differences all contribute to inefficient communication between designers and reduce overall effectiveness. Even for single-site teams, collaboration often depends on email/voice and issues can be misunderstood or dropped altogether.
ReviewIC is the first DM-Driven, IC Design Review platform, seamlessly integrated into your design environment and DM database.
ReviewIC provides an intuitive communication platform where comments, designer intent, action items, design files and general discussions are associated with groups of cellview objects. Design window apertures, layer settings and other contextual information are stored as part of the review in a persistent, lightweight database. Updates are reflected real-time in active ReviewIC sessions, ensuring participants at any design location have the most current data. Once issues have been identified, fixes are correlated with outstanding action items to ensure closure. Review owners can confirm the validity of the changes using visual diff tools from MergeIC.
ReviewIC includes an wiki/defect-tracker integration to the ReviewIC database and review activity is automatically archived and made available to interested parties over the corporate intranet. This allows project-managers to track design-review activity without needing access to Cadence; other designers can peruse reviews and get ideas in their circuits; the designer him/herself has a convenient way to archive reviews for later investigation; and if a designer leaves the company, all the review history for their circuits are readily available.
Example uses of ReviewIC include
Peer circuit design reviews
Designers can annotate comments, simulation file data, verilog and other meta-data to schematics which are all accessible via markers on the cellviews. All of this can be done offline at the reviewing designer's convenience.
Layout reviews
The circuit owner can review layout offline by annotating comments and creating tracker-issues on the layout cellview, which in turn can be commented on by the layout person. Once corrective action has been agreed upon the layout person can make edits and checkin the new version of the layout. Upon checkin the review thread will be updated to reference the new version and the ciruit owner can use the schematic/layout visual-diff tool box from MergeIC to sanity check the changes.
Designer's Notebook
ReviewIC can also operate as a "Designer's Notebook" where simulation waveform screenshots, Excel spreadsheets, VerilogA files, designer notes and other meta-data can be attached to nodes on the schematic using custom markers. These markers and their associated (managed) objects/files are recorded in a shared database in "Notebook" format, where users can overlay their notebooks and/or other designers'notes on cellviews to get a full sense of the design-intent behind the design.
