Comprehensive Change Management for SoC Design

Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC) are becoming increasingly complex, leading to corresponding increases in the complexity of SoC design and development. SoC are composed of IP from multiple sources. These IP components and other elements of the SoC may be subject to change for various reasons and at varying rates. Uncontrolled changes can lead to widespread verification failures and performance problems, triggering redesign and reverification and greatly increasing SoC development times and costs.

We propose to address this problem by introducing comprehensive change management for SoC development. Change management, which is widely used in the software industry, involves controlling when and where changes can be introduced into a system under development and tracking the dependencies between components so that changes can be propagated quickly, completely, and correctly.

This recommendation is based on in-depth discussions with more than 30 experts in electronic design from across IBM. They identified over 20 significant change management problems in commercial chip development. A priority was to “bring everything under change control.”

In this paper we address two main topics: One is typical scenarios in electronic design; these provide a framework for determining where change management can be supported and leveraged. The other the specification of a comprehensive schema to illustrate the range of data and relationships that are important for change management in SoC design.