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Customer QuotesWe've found that a DM infrastructure, properly defined and executed, increases the likelihood of first-pass silicon success by decreasing mistakes caused by the use of obsolete data. ClioSoft's new SOS platform should help us share data and greatly ease the task of moving personnel between projects. The Enterprise Edition's ability to leverage PDKs and IP across multiple projects is very appealing. We look forward to exploring the potential to bring more of our design data under SOS control via the Universal DM Adaptor technology. ClioSoft's data management collaboration platform has helped us manage design data from digital, analog, and RF teams at multiple sites, improving design team productivity as we develop high-performance CMOS RF and mixed-signal semiconductors for the cellular industry. The universal data management adaptor looks very promising as a way to manage our Agilent ADS data for upcoming projects. DALSA uses ClioSoft's SOS Design Collaboration Platform to help us manage shared design data among design teams world-wide, during the active design process. The product has definitely helped our productivity as we design, develop, and manufacture digital imaging products and solutions, and the level of support from ClioSoft has been excellent. We've appreciated the ease of use delivered by ClioSoft's tight integration with specific design tools in the past. The ability to manage data from any tool -- a feature of the new Enterprise Edition -- looks like something that will be of benefit to any design team. My company has eight design offices distributed across America and Europe developing chips for Network Communications Ultra Low Power markets. I am responsible for the EDA Infrastructure within the company. We have used SOS as our standard configuration management solution for several years. We use both the standard SOS product and the version which integrates with the Cadence design environment. Configuration Management using SOS is of critical importance to our design processes. SOS works efficiently and effectively providing the features we need for a fractionof the cost of alternatives and with a fraction of the administrative overhead. I have worked with many EDA vendors over the years and value good relationships. Some vendors are very difficult to work with and others very good. I have consistently found working with Cliosoft to be one of the best vendor relationships I have ever experienced. The quality andresponsiveness of Cliosoft's support operation, both commercially and technically, is second to none. Negotiating a contract was a straightforward and pleasant experience. We finished negotiations with confidence that we had an equitable deal, beneficial to both parties and have never felt let down. During the course of the contract Cliosoft mettheir commitments with friendliness and responsivness. Always doing what they say they will do, being flexible when we need them to be and never opportunistically sqeezing extra cash out of the deal. Cliosoft's technical support is of the same high standard. They respond very quickly to support queries with a genuine commitment to finding satisfactory solutions. They are also excellent at responding to feedback from their customer quickly and effectively. Several features in the current SOS product were introduced as a result of constructive dialogue between ourselves and Cliosoft support. I continue to stand by my statement of several months ago: None of the many other EDA vendors we deal with does support better. Clisoft SOS works well for my company. I enjoy working with Cliosoft and hope to continue the relationship for a long time to come. I would like to say that Cliosoft provides the BEST and most timely support of any of our EDA vendors!!! Because our problems many times mean a work STOP, this is very important!!! We’re a small start up and have used Cliosoft Design Management software since June, 2007. We don’t have a dedicated CAD person. I personally installed the software with Cliosoft people and served as an administrator. The product is very easy to use. Anytime we had a problem and Cliosoft was very prompt in solving it for us over the phone or using webex connection. The product has been working for us very well. We have taped out a chip design with it and the silicon came back fully functional. We chose ClioSoft’s SOS viaDFII as the DM solution not only because it met the technical and usability requirements, but also because of the excellent technical support. SOS viaDFII is very well-integrated with the Cadence toolset. It is simple, yet complete. Even designers who have never used version control were able to pick up the basics and become productive very quickly. It even automatically prompts for checkout when you want to edit a cellview. Engineers keep the SOS GUI open to get the additional visibility into the project. We requested ClioSoft to make the branch and merge capabilities available directly in the Cadence Library Manager. ClioSoft delivered on our request and this made concurrent PDK development a reality. Makefile, scripts and tool extensions such as SKILL code are an integral part of our Custom IC Design Flow. Therefore we manage these files in SOS as well. The project repositories have all the data and scripts needed to create the customized environment to manage the design flow for custom IC design. We adopted several new tools for this project and SOS viaDFII has been an unqualified success! Four other Custom ICs are now in the pipeline at Tektronix using SOS viaDFII for design data management. I was also impressed with Cliosoft SOS when I used it. The unbeatable SOS feature is its capability to version track *directories* as well as files. CVS poorly handles directories, you can't revert or track groups of files other than by tagging them or remembering a given date. With SOS you can say "give me directory xyz version 32" and it will automatically recreate dir xyz with the files it contained at directory version 32. Directories are versioned controled in SOS, unlike in CVS. More on CVS limited capabilities with directories here (make sure you read the sections on renaming directories as well): http://cvsbook.red-bean.com/cvsbook.html#Removing_Directories I agree with Thomas on the quality of support and feature improvement with Cliosoft. I have seen features I requested being implemented. Not all vendors do that, and when you use CVS, it is pretty hard to convince the open source software community that you think a feature could be useful. The replies I go from them was 'do it yourself - this is open source - and if a majority want it, then you can roll it in and support it, otherwise you have to maintain your own development branch'. Posted in Verification Guild I have used RCS, CVS and ClioSoft over the last decade. The real issue is putting a process and methodology in place that provides engineers, who would benefit from using Version Control, the follow goals: No Compelling reason NOT to use it! Ease of understand of what a configuration means and how to create and recover a configuration. Desire to checkpoint the design frequently - i.e. how many designs are released with files at 1.1 or 1.2? Of all the tools I have used I have always tried to put in place the methodology that meets those desired goals. The one tool I have had the most success with is SOS from ClioSoft! Yes, if you want to maintain 100's of files this tool has a direct cost associated with it (100 files or less per project are supported by a free license). But, what many don't understand is the indirect costs of not meeting the above three goals. If you miss goal #1 then why bother doing any work on a Version Management System. If the tool and process are difficult to use or cumbersome to use; then engineers won't use it. It has to be easy to use and scale during the life of your project. If you miss goal #2 then you have missed a large benefit of Version Management. How do you know what you simulated was what you built? This question can not be asked after you have taped out that latest $1M ASIC. If you miss goal #3 then you have lost the design history; what was tried and what was successful. It is difficult to have a maintainable design if you don't have a history of the design creation. Yes, RCS and CVS can do the version management work of ClioSoft's SOS; in fact RCS is behind the scenes of SOS. Yes, you could build a GUI (or use one of the free ones) that is targeted to your flow. But, I would ask why when ClioSoft spent the effort to understand the hardware design process, hardware engineers likes and dislikes and mold it into a stable platform. ClioSoft's SOS had a client-server design which works cross platform. I use it in my office with WindowsNT and Linux. I have it on one client site using Solaris, HPUX, Windows95 and Windows2000. This client has several projects but the largest is ~10K files and represented ~12 design teams work over the last 5 years. The latest version of SOS provides a method to have multiple remote servers which allows replication of the repository data. This would allow a company to have an East Coast and West Coast operations with data being shared real time. The remote servers allow the data to appear local to each office. I have worked with groups that didn't really think they needed version management and grumbled when Management made it a requirement. These same engineers embraced the system when they had to move back 12 days in time to recover a working design. The ability to move back in time or to a specific date is a real asset of SOS. This can be done with RCS and CVS but it takes a deeper understanding of the tools then just selecting the date in a GUI. As a bonus, they have added several releases ago, is an issue tracking system. This allows you to attach issues to design files or directories. This feature can be customized with assigned task and notification. I find it very easy to use and explain to other engineers. Having issue tracking with version management just seems to make sense to me. I would encourage you to look at ClioSoft's web site and download the free version to give it a spin (http://www.cliosoft.com). I have been very happy with the support and feature improvements since my first introduction to ClioSoft over 5 years ago. I wish you luck and encourage you to think about my three stated goals above. Posted in Verification Guild I have used Cliosoft's SOS tool for the past five years I can tell you that this tool has made our lives a lot easier. My current project is a multi-site international project with several design centers in India. I believe managing such projects without the appropriate code revision tool is a recipe for disaster. I had used RCS prior to SOS but I have had no reason to look at any other tool since I started using SOS from Cliosoft. Cliosoft has done a great job of improving their tools too. The new release V3.02 allowed us to share our database from remote servers with reduced traffic and increased efficiency. I believe this tool is blessing for IC design projects and I will highly recommend it to anyone anytime. If you are running a IC design project do not look further than Cliosoft's SOS V3.02. I found Cliosoft's SOS program to be an easy to use RCS and have used it to manage our design files for our recent microchip. Based on my tutorings of co-workers, it took on average 30 min for them to learn how to use the basics of SOS. Technical support from Cliosoft was great. All of my questions were handled promptly. One thing to note though, I've only used SOS to manage text files. I've never tried it on other types of file formats. Posted in ESNUG Our hardware group have been using Cliosoft for 3 years and haven't had any major problems....SOS (Cliosoft) is much simpler and costs less than Clearcase. Posted in ESNUG As I explained to a client several years ago when they were looking for an answer to your this problem. You could stick with RCS, which your engineers hate; you could switch to CVS and pay me to write wrapper scripts to make it work; or you could buy Cliosoft SOS and have everything you need. They chose SOS. Briefly the client mix that uses SOS are working on 1 Mgate ASIC's, FPGAs and Systems. As a testament to the stability of SOS, I have a client who is managing ~ 10K files using SOS 1.80b which was released over 2 years ago. There have not been any bugs. This same client is migrating other teams who are doing hardware design over to the 2.40b version of SOS with the management of about ~3K files and growing. This hardware design team had several tests which ran on the PC (Windows 95) and SOS worked seamlessly. The database resides on an HP-UX server with the clients a mix of PC's, Sun's and HP's. That was one of the big differences between SOS and others is they have the multi-platform approach working. For my clients I manage repositories from a Linux Server and allow my clients and other subcontractors access via the SOS client software. They can be on any of the supported platforms and integrate with the database. This has allowed me to hire subcontractors from around the world to work on my projects. The Ease-of-Use cannot be overlooked, this package can be mastered by anyone in under 30 minutes. Sure there are operations that take a little deeper understanding but 90% of the most common operations can be learned in this 30 minute timeframe. For those of you familiar with Tags ask yourself this question: 'What does it take to move a tag on a group of files with RCS/CVS/ClearCase and others?' In SOS you select the group of files and hit the tag button; Pick a tag from the list and select OK. Now all the selected files have the same tag. Another problem that occurs is "It worked last week!" How do you get back to that point? In SOS it has the ability to back up to a date and time. This is very powerful in a multiple person environment. Finally administration doesn't take a full time engineer to manage. You do need someone who will take the time to study getting the environment set-up; about 4 hours in most cases. You know engineers don't RTFM! There are lots of options here, but the way that my clients and I have used it is basically out of the box. Again a testament to the developers of SOS thinking through the design and what is needed by HW engineers. The SOS team has focused on Hardware Design Engineers writing HDL code and everything that goes with the development of ASIC/FPGA and systems. They have integration for Cadence and Visual HDL; I just started using the Visual interface and it works great and supports binary formats. Hardware Engineers don't want to use software approaches to data management, SOS provides them a powerful tool to manage data. Posted in ESNUG As well as using ClioSoft's SOS to manage our design data for safer tape-outs, we needed a better way to track bugs, add and modify change requests and report bug resolutions. ClioSoft quickly answered our requests with a new module that provides us with a better way to track our bugs and their status. Using SOS for hardware design in a Verilog and Cadence DFII environment SOS helped out tremendously. Everyone thinks very highly of it. It allowed our team of 6 engineers to work together without stepping on each others toes, and also increased communication and awareness. The graphical user interface was great for our novice users, yet did not limit the more advanced users who could also tap into more powerful features, including the command line interface and GUI customization features. Using SOS for hardware design with Verilog SOS is so easy to use and robust that engineers will actually switch voluntarily from RCS or CVS! That should be testimony enough since they are typically reluctant to change to new tools. Using SOS for hardware design with Verilog SOS is the most intuitive source control user-interface we've tried. Our engineers are up and running in minutes rather than hours - without any training on the product whatsoever. While it is difficult to put quantitative numbers on a product like this, we are certain that our time spent in version control and release management has dropped in half since purchasing this tool. Using SOS for software development with C/C++ |
