Tuscany Dashboard, Web-enabled IC Design Solution Unveiled

Tuscany Design Automation specializing in structured placement and visualization solutions for integrated circuit design introduced the Tuscany Dashboard, a Web-enabled solution for visualization and control of IC design data for bridging front-end and back-end teams.

 

The company strives to provide ease of collaboration, access and implementation to design teams and managers and it launched the Tuscany dashboard for this purpose at Design Automation Conference 2009 taking place in San Francisco.

 

Design teams require “golden” sign-off tools from timing to back-end place-and-route and final verification. This ensures that the final design and physical layout achieve the specified functional, timing and power requirements. These tools produce an analysis of the design and acquire a specific version of the data. This results in time-consuming overhead due to data integration and coordination across tools or groups.

 

This poses a problem during final stages of designing and also gets complicated as design teams become large and geographically dispersed. Communication between various teams is imperative and all the information about the entire design has to be available in one place, explained the company.

 

The Tuscany Dashboard offers a Web interface that enhances communication and visualization among design teams and the management. It enables distributed development in conditions where engineers have to work in multiple sites, with multiple chips in progress and with design constraints. Team members can share visualization and annotation to optimize power, timing and placement.

 

Consistent views of data collected from different tools can be viewed in a heterogeneous physical design flow like status of metrics, visualization of critical paths and the history of the design. The entire history of all modifications made to the design database and changes made to metrics can be studied. This allows comparisons from any point in the design timeline up to the state of the design at that moment.

 

The Tuscany Dashboard aggregates the output of the data from existing tools into a single source. It provides engineering views of current focal point issues or “hot spots” in the design. The customizable metrics, history and trends are summarized and offered on well-designed Web pages, said Tuscany.

 

“Most design teams have custom or unique tools added to fill specific gaps in the primary flow,” noted Keith Mueller, president and CEO of Tuscany Design Automation.

 

He added that this compounds the traditional communication gap that exists between front-end and back-end designers. The Tuscany Dashboard provides a solid platform for management tracking and ensures that designers can see what they need to see and do what they need to do to complete a design optimally.