Access
Ever feel like you’re swimming in data but without the ability to understand what it all means? Most vendors believe that theirs should be the only tool you use, which typically means writing lots of scripts to try to extract insight from a deluge of data. Meet George. He had exactly this problem, right in the midst of trying to tape-out his design. How did he solve this problem?
He really had two different problems to solve: First, he needed to aggregate the data from his team's various signoff tools and the place-and-route system into a single location. Second, he needed a simple way to visualize and control the data in order to understand the progress his team was making toward closure.
Tuscany’s underlying platform is designed to be extensible, and extremely modular. It reads data in multiple formats from a variety of tools and integrates all of the information into a single robust data model. These capabilities allowed George to bring in LEF, DEF, Verilog, Liberty, Timing Reports, etc., all into a single robust data model and solved his first problem.
Once all of the data were in a single place, it was simple to start addressing his second challenge. Tuscany provides a powerful extension language interface (in Perl, Python, and TCL) enabling easy access to the underlying data for both analysis and manipulation.
Tuscany's web-enabled visualization helped George even more by tying the above elements into a simple web-based solution showing how his design was approaching closure. This visualization allowed him to quickly see a snapshot of the various metrics, and how they were progressing toward tapeout after each iteration. He was able to provide help to the engineers working on blocks that were in trouble because he could help identify persistent issues from the history of the metrics, and see whether the iterations were making improvements. His engineers were able to visualize the critical timing paths immediately, and easily carry on a conversation about them with their colleagues across the globe.
The engineers were also able to launch the design tool just by cutting and pasting a line from the web tool into their xterm. They could immediately begin to do rapid what-if analysis on their design using Tuscany's incremental timer and power calculator. They could see how various changes might impact the design without having to run through the full flow again just to gain insight about their proposed fixes.
The result? Productivity across the full design team increased, and George and his team were able to escape tape-out hell, and close the design.
Tired of flipping through page after page of text, hoping for some enlightened view of how to fix your problem? Check out Tuscany Dashboard!
| CHECK OUT DASHBOARD |  |
| CHECK OUT BADGER | |