Guest Blogger 
Amit Varde
Applications and Support Manager, ClioSoft The CAD Team – Unsung heroes in a successful tapeoutMarch 14th, 2014 by Amit Varde
For most of my career, I worked as a CAD and design flow engineer. In the fall of 2012, I moved to a different role, as an applications and support manager at ClioSoft Inc. In my opinion, this was a very good opportunity for me to work with other CAD engineers and teams. Having worked with different CAD teams in my career, I have often felt that the CAD engineers do not get the credit that they richly deserve for the effort they put in. Most CAD engineers did not plan on being CAD engineers when they graduated from college. What moved them in the direction of CAD is the “discovery” that they had an excellent understanding of UNIX, design methodology and programming and also had good communication skills. In the semiconductor industry, the CAD/EDA engineers wear a number of hats during the course of a project. Sometimes they don the role of a system administrator, where they predict and provision compute resources for a project or, depending on the size of a company, even help in tasks such as setting up simulation farms for the project. With the growing number of geographically dispersed design centers, and the ever-increasing size of the design data, good network access speed and efficient utilization of disk space becomes a top priority for designers working remotely. In addition, there is growing concern about controlling access to sensitive data when it crosses national boundaries. CAD teams often work very closely with IT solution providers to provide the best-suited solution. The CAD team also interfaces between the design teams and EDA vendors to evaluate the design tools that ensure that correct tools are set up for the design project. Their deep understanding of design flows and scripting capabilities help them set up and automate the flows for the design project to ensure that the tapeout happens smoothly. And at times CAD engineers have also stepped into the trenches to help with design implementation. If you think of the design team as the offence, the CAD engineers are the defense. No matter how good the offence is, it needs to be backed by a good defense to win the game. CAD engineers rarely get the glory, but as the Super Bowl recently proved yet again: defense wins championships. So the next time you bump into a CAD engineer, remember to give him a pat on the back. Tags: Amit Verde, Cliosoft Category: Cliosoft One Response to “The CAD Team – Unsung heroes in a successful tapeout” |
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Ideally, the so-called CAD team and its members should be more than specialized IT organization. But I have seen such teams range from being service organizations within their company or division, to direct members of a product team. In the latter case, they have more direct impact on engineering process and methodology but it is often custom tailored to the needs of their product organization, not general for all of the organization. In the former case, they find solutions applicable across their organization but are then mired in a struggle to tailor it to the needs of each product group (who, if not satisfied, go back to using the approach of their last project regardless of the extra effort and suffering it entails). I have also seen many organizations who go back and forth between the two models.