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Product category: Design and Development Software
News Release from: Perforce Software | Subject: SCM
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 19 April 2002

Management software keeps designs on
track

Perforce Software has unveiled the development architecture that is enabling hardware and software design companies to reduce time to market and deliver highly integrated products.

Perforce Software has unveiled the development architecture that is enabling hardware and software design companies to reduce time to market and deliver highly integrated products, thereby improving product efficiency and reliability The Perforce Software Configuration Management (SCM) system architecture provides a rich set of features that meet the demands of concurrent hardware-hardware and hardware-software development

These features include a powerful and flexible release and configuration management architecture, support for geographically distributed design teams, a strong procedural interface and application programmers' interface (API) for tool integration, support on over 50 different platforms, a low maintenance requirement, and the ability to manage all files in the development process, thus allowing a consistent methodology to be applied across all development areas, including software, physical design and verification.

Perforce also presents a low capital and recurring cost proposition.

Perforce is used by a wide variety of companies, including nVidia, Afara Web Systems, Pixim, Silicon Graphics, ReShape and Matrix Semiconductor.

At Matrix Semiconductor, Perforce is being used to develop the world's first 3D integrated circuits using standard materials.

Afara Web Systems is using Perforce to develop IP traffic management systems, and Pixim for its Digital Pixel System technology.

For concurrent hardware-hardware and hardware-software development, the solution's branching capability is key to many of the advantages that makes Perforce such a flexible and powerful tool in the hardware and embedded development space.

Perforce's unique Inter-File Branching (IFB) technology makes the matter of branching trivial.

The technology's name reflects the unique implementation of branching in Perforce.

Branching is the act of creating a variant, files are the configuration items and inter-file reflects the fact that variants are separate files.

It enables fast creation of workspaces that are controlled by the users of the workspaces without compromising any integration policies - meaning chip managers do not have to worry about the introduction of new data, and engineers can continue introducing new data as chips move closer and closer to tapeout.

It also means that there is no interruption to developers' design streams and work processes.

The combination of Perforce's Inter-File Branching (IFB), Atomic Transactions and Change-Based architecture, eliminates the need for the majority of tagging operations which significantly slow down the speed of SCMs with more primitive branching technology.

The change-based client server architecture means that every transaction in the system is assigned a unique change number, making it very easy to track changes throughout the entire tree.

As state is stored centrally in the server and not in the workspaces, data recovery, mining and reporting tasks are fast and easy to perform.

With Atomic Transactions, Perforce guarantees that a group of files that are submitted together will stay that way, and that this information is consistent.

Specific state data is always recoverable, since every change has a transaction associated with it and the Perforce relational database allows users to recover sets of files to any point in time.

Jeremy Russell, Buildmeister at ReShape, a physical design company commented: "The ability of client workspaces and branches to communicate in an organised fashion is still the primary win for us, as well as the revision control.

Client experiments can be quickly propagated to other workspaces in a manner which allows us to track development and understand the process that we went through to bring a chip to tapeout - helping us improve both the software element of our flow and the chip development process for future chips".

Shiv Sikand, previously of Silicon Graphics commented: "At Silicon Graphics we used Perforce to manage the data associated with 16 million transistor ASICs as well as integrating Perforce as the DM system for the Cadence DFII design tools.

We use branches extensively to a snap-shot a design to ensure netlist and layout consistency.

By forward or reverse integrating a branch, we are able to make automatic, incremental changes to snap-shots, which is a big win.

84,000 changes and 7Gbyte later, the tool is just as fast as it was on day one".

nVidia's Director of Software Engineering commented: "We build multiple derivatives of a project.

Using the branching capability of Perforce streamlines the process.

A new derivative is assigned a branch, allowing the developers to work on the new product with full and complete access to all prior development history.

This approach was instrumental in allowing us to produce several versions of our GeForce3 GPUs, 6 GeForce chip variants within 12 months.

We use Perforce in the development of all our products including our graphics processing units (GPUs) such as the GeForce2, GeForce3, GeForce4, and the Quadro line of professional products.

We would not have been able to do what they have, in the way they have, without specifically using Perforce's SCM system".

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