Cadence Virtuoso release highlights usability

A new release of Cadence’s Virtuoso custom-design platform is probably not a stop-the-presses moment these days. Most potential users likely have known about IC6.1.4 for months. But the formal announcement does give us some data with which to reflect on the sate of custom design tools and EDA in general.

The first thing that becomes clear about 6.1.4 is that this release is about usability, not about solving new classes of technical design problems. Perhaps you could take this as a sign that design teams are not developing radically new IP or hurrying to new process nodes, and hence aren’t facing new technical challenges. Or perhaps you could conclude that, struggling with constrained budgets, Cadence customers want to see fewer engineer-hours going into necessary tasks, even if the results stay the same. Both conclusions seem consistent with what we are hearing about design in the new global reality.

The usability features Cadence selected mostly relate to the user-hours issue. For example, 6.1.4 includes enhanced ability to use an interactive graphics interface for design entry and editing. The release brings space-based wire-placement technology—from Cadence’s space-based router batch tool—to the Virtuoso wire editor, potentially eliminating iterations in the interconnect-design process. The company has also improved the way Virtuoso inputs and handles design constraints. There is now a wizard for entering constraints, as well as new tools for managing the constraints, back-annotating to them during the design process, and verifying that the layout team actually met the constraints.

There is another significant aspect to usability in the release that might be called user-interface efficiency. Cadence is naming this effort the Metrics-Driven Productivity Initiative, and this probably means that, in keeping with other programs Cadence has called Initiatives, this one will have a top manager assigned to it, will get resources, and will influence the way Cadence addresses its market. In the case of the 6.1.4 release, the initiative means that Cadence retrieves log files from user sessions—making sure the users are informed and consenting—and builds from the files a database of user effort: things like mouse clicks and mouse motions. Cadence has built an internal data-mining widget to explore this data, looking for patterns of high user-interface traffic, and is using the results to streamline tasks that seem to require a lot of thrashing about.

Often the results of this analysis can be surprising, according to Cadence group director of marketing John Stabenow. For example, analysis showed that the simple ruler function in the layout user interface was both heavily used and inefficient. The Cadence team used this information to come up with an intelligent ruler function in the new release, which Stabenow says cuts 90 percent of the zooms and clicks required for dimension measurements.

There is a variety of other enhancements in the release, including performance improvements and upgrading of all the pieces in the platform to 64-bit address space. One presumes that after learning-curve costs, this could save hard-pressed design teams some much-needed time.