Is Big Data for IC Design Too Big to Manage?

　　Big data? Everyone’s doing it. It shows up now in biotech, finance, agriculture, education and transportation. Industries are letting it reshape the very nature of their business.

　　But what about semiconductors?

　　IC Manage Inc., a provider of design data and IP management software for chip companies, announced Wednesday (Dec. 13) the launch of its Big Data Labs.

　　Dean Drako, IC Manage CEO, described Big Data Labs as a “platform” on which his company hopes to “develop and customize new big-data-based design analytic tools” for customers.

　　In the big-data era, semiconductor companies are already designing ICs that go into data centers. The question, though, is if these chip designers use big data themselves. They already have tons of raw data — spit out by different EDA vendors’ tools.

　　But have electronics designers figured out a way to optimize and accelerate their chips with big data?

　　The simple answer is “not yet.”

　　Certainly, the semiconductor industry has been using data management software for several years. IC Manage has been offering tools to “keep large amounts of data safe and get it neatly organized so that it makes data accessible to others,” explained Laurie Balch, a chief analyst with Gary Smith EDA.

　　But as for the analytical tools that might enable IC designers to apply this data to intelligent decisions, “We are at a point, it’s only now that it’s become feasible,” Balch told us.

　　IC Manage isn’t a traditional EDA vendor. It makes no conventional EDA tools such as simulation, synthesis, or layout. Instead, the company’s specialty is in “EDA enterprise tools,” explained Balch. Describing it as “a company with a stronghold in the IC design database market,” she called IC Manage “the industry leader, by a long shot.”

　　At a time when “electronics design is known for a huge amount of data it’s creating,” she observed that chip vendors are wrestling with increasingly voluminous data. IC Manage might just become the first company to come up with a solution.

　　Unstructured data

　　Big data, by definition, consists of large unstructured data, explained Drako.

　　He acknowledged that the world of electronics design is already seeing a huge spike in unstructured data — coming independently from various tools designed by different EDA companies.

　　Most IC designers, however, aren’t equipped to absorb all this stuff, let alone make sense of it. It’s time-consuming and resource-intensive to do so.

　　Connecting the dots between such independent sets of data across tools and vendors is no easy feat, said Drako.

　　Furthermore, “there are only limited industry and company expertise and resources available” that can quickly derive actionable insights and create management options with implementation details, he added.

　　This is where IC Manage hopes to come in.

　　Drako explained that IC Manage has overlaid unstructured data on top of the organized design data. “By merging unstructured data (such as verification log files) and structured data (electronics design data), we are offering a hybrid database,” said Drako, which chip companies can use for running high-performance advanced EDA analytics.

　　The result that IC Manage hopes to achieve is a platform offering visual analytics that will help users create interactive reports.

　　Tape-out prediction

　　This isn’t IC Manage’s first foray into big-data design tools for IC vendors.

　　A few years ago, the company developed a big-data product called “Envision Design Progress Analytics.” The tool offered a foundation for IC Manage customers to accurately predict the tape-out of their new chips.

　　With the launch of Big Data Labs, though, IC Manage is taking it a few steps further. Organizing big data and making it accessible to everyone in a design team or a whole company isn’t enough.

　　By closely working with customers (chip companies) and partners (EDA tool vendors), IC Manage hopes to develop — and potentially customize — tools that will allow designers to keep track of every designer’s contributions, history of revisions, IP reuse, and any other actions. This will result in a tool allowing designers to see the impact of their decisions on the rest of the design process. Its analysis will help them make intelligent decisions, noted Drako.

　　Envision Verification

　　On Wednesday, IC Manage simultaneously announced the launch of its first verification analytics tool, “Envision Verification,” based on its Big Data Labs’ platform.

　　Leveraging the platform’s ability to link multi-vendor environments, the tool delivers “near-real-time visual analytics,” according to IC Manage.

　　“To understand everything that’s going on,” Drako said that Envision Verification pulls in all verification data from different EDA vendor environments — Verilog, Mentor and Cadence — and tracks design activity, regression tests and verification status, and bugs that emerge along the way. Then it identifies the changes.

　　Without such big-data verification, Drako said, “Traditionally, if you were a part of a 300-engineer team, you’d have to spend a lot of time asking around, ‘Did you change anything?’ ‘What’s tested?’ ‘Who broke it?’ ‘Are we missing anything?’ etc.”

　　With an interactive report of verification results in hand, “Envision can accelerate functional verification analytics by 10 to 100 times. You can identify not only bottlenecks but also root causes of problems that have emerged during a verification process,” said Drako.

　　Bug-tracking analytics is also part of the process. With Envision Verification, “an engineer can assign a ticket for further debug when a test fails or update the bug status to pass, fail, or needs investigation,” according to IC Manage.

　　Over time, Drako noted, “Development teams can immediately tie verification progress bottlenecks directly to design changes to quickly optimize their resources to accelerate tight schedules. Also, they should be able to do milestone estimations.”

　　The analyst Balch explained that verification is an “extraordinarily big challenge” for electronic designers. Because everyone aims for “first-time right” design and manufacture — due to the cost-prohibitive nature of chip redesign, “designers need to verify the heck out of it,” she said. Verification involves many test facets, she noted, “as outcomes change depending on operating conditions and you need to be cognizant of corner cases.”

　　The first tool coming out of IC Manage’s newly launched Big Data Labs is this functional verification tool. But what else does IC Manage have in the pipeline?

　　Drako hesitated to make predictions until his company is actually ready to reveal. Nonetheless, he said that other logical big-data analytics products would include physical verification, timing analysis and power.

　　Pointing out that there are so many parts to functional verification, including simulation and emulation of semiconductor, circuit, digital, and analog designs, Balch suspects that IC Manage will be busy for a long time developing further its functional verification tools — including customizations.

　　Who will use it?

　　There is no denying that the use of data-management tools has been somewhat “slow to take off” among chip companies, according to Balch. Given a budget, chip designers prefer to buy core design tools rather than big-data analytics tools. “They just don’t see it as vital. They also think it’s only for a big design team.”

　　With the semiconductor industry currently engulfed in mega-mergers, the landscape might be changing more rapidly than previously predicted, however. If Broadcom succeeds in buying Qualcomm, for example, imagine the data-management nightmare that will hit a huge number of design teams running inside the two giants. The merged company needs to monitor progress at different design teams, ensuring that design information and IPs are shared across the board.

　　IC Manage’s Envision Verification Analytics is available immediately as part of the IC Manage Envision product suite.