8.3 Mentor Graphics Corporation

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Mentor Graphics Corporation supplies software and hardware design solutions that enable companies to send better electronic products to market faster and more cost effectively. The company offers innovative products and solutions that help engineers overcome the challenges they face in the increasingly complex world of board and chip design—in which deep submicron (DSM) technology and system-on-chip (SoC) design multiply the challenges of establishing promising product ideas on the market [1].

The Mentor Graphics Corporation business unit (BU) we interviewed has a wide range of customers in the electronics field, from small to very large companies. It supplies out-of-the-box software products, with thousands of licenses for their use sold to the electronics design automation (EDA) industry annually. This BU markets different packages of software, four or five in each family, usually two main releases per year plus revisions in the form of patches when necessary.

This case study is focused on the Hardware Description Languages (HDL) Design Entry BU of the HDL division, one of the product divisions of the Mentor Graphics Corporation. The HDL Design Entry BU designs and supplies two different kinds of software products: the HDL Designer Series, a family of software tools to capture, analyze, and manage register transfer level (RTL) designs using HDL, and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) Advantage, a suite of tools for the design, verification and implementation of FPGA.

The HDL division markets only software, unlike some of the other Mentor-divisions. Software products for the U.S. market are shipped from Wilsonville, Oregon (the location of corporate headquarters), and for the international market, products are shipped from the division’s facility in Ireland.

Mentor Graphics Corporation has developed an extensive support organization in United States and abroad, in both Europe and Asia. It also has a consulting organization available for customization of the tools it markets or to help customers with their design flow. Customers who have entered into a maintenance agreement with Mentor Graphics Corporation can enter a call log and submit a defect report (DR) or an enhancement request (ER) through the call centers. The status of the call log is monitored by an automatic system.

8.3.1 Development process and PLC

8.3.1.1 Requirements management

Requirements are assembled in different ways—through interviews, customers meetings, sales presentations, and partnerships with universities. In the HDL Design Entry BU, the chief scientist and product architect are responsible for issuing a marketing requirement document (MRD). The engineering group then produces a technical specification on the basis of the MRD. The engineering group, the marketing organization, and the management group decide in agreement what functionality should be developed for each particular release. The quality assurance department collaborates with the engineering department in planning and assuring testing procedures. Similarly, the customer documentation department plans the customer documentation with the engineering department. Customers with a maintenance agreement are entitled to upgrades of the releases.

8.3.1.2 Development process

The HDL Design Entry BU is one of the few groups in the Mentor Graphics Corporation that use an off-the-shelf library as a basis for the implementation of its products. In this case, it is a standard library from the French company ILOG. This library is developed for different platforms and provides the ability to develop single source code applications across multiple platforms. A specific product variant is built using conditional compilation. Graphical user interface and C++ libraries (C++ View from SCL, Ltd) are used in addition to the ILOG standard library.

A daily build procedure is performed for software using standard Make files. The HDL division develops and releases software but does not manufacture the final products, which are delivered on CDs.

The HDL Design Entry BU develops software in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Egypt, with the different engineering teams working in close cooperation. Today, RCS is used as the SCM tool, but the unit is moving to a Rational ClearCase environment. The main reasons for changing the SCM tool are: geographically dispersed development teams, concurrent development (managing multiple branching and merging) features, and demands for improvement of the traceability of changes. SNIFF+ from Wind River Systems will be used on top of ClearCase. This tool already has an interface to both ClearCase and RCS. This enables SNIFF+ to use the RCS repositories and ClearCase database and also both standard Make files and ClearCase Make files. This gives the ability to smoothly transition from one tool to another and to keep a transparent interface during the transition process (see Figure 8.4).

Figure 8.4: A transparent interface to SCM tools.

From time to time, the division outsources the development of software components. This is always done in a very controlled way; only very welldefined, independent, and self-contained pieces of software are outsourced. The companies developing the outsourced components have a development process similar to that of the HDL Design Entry BU. For example, they also use MRDs, technical specifications, and test plans. The original source code will always be delivered to the division. The main Mentor engineering team is always responsible for the integration of the outsourced software components.

8.3.1.3 CM and change management

The HDL division uses a simple SCM process supporting basic versioning, baseline, and change management. All baselines are managed manually on the fileserver. All metadata (e.g., information regarding releases and baselines) are stored on this fileserver. Versions of baselines are managed manually by creating and updating a directory structure based on the software release number.

All changes identified are placed in MRDs. Customer support can influence the change process through the report from ERs and DRs from customers. All changes in the source code are managed in the SCM tool (i.e., stored in the RCS repository). Changes are connected to a BL using comments in RCS. There is no traceability from a CR to the actual changes made implementing the request.

There are plans to introduce ClearCase Unified Change Management (UCM) to ClearQuest to improve the management of changes.

8.3.2 Document management

The HDL Design Entry BU has no large volume of documentation and therefore no need for a traditional document management tool. The documents are placed in the server’s file system and the file system and the RCS repository are used for managing the access to documents. Requirement documents are mainly written with the Microsoft Office tool suite. Software documentation and customer documentation is written in FrameMaker. Complex documents (i.e., documents that may consist of several files) are managed by FrameMaker’s book support. All customer documentation is shipped in PDF format, either by publishing it on the Web or on a CD. Some documentation is also converted to hypertext markup language (HTML) format and made available on the Web.

8.3.3 Conclusion

The main advantage to the HDL Design Entry BU of using an SCM tool is the ability it provides to manage the handling of thousands of files and classes developed by many users at different locations. It would, in fact, be very difficult for them to manage and create their tools without SCM tools.

The HDL Design Entry BU development environment has been in place for several years and is being improved in parallel with product development. The improvement process is not trivial. It requires dedicated resources from both the information technology and engineering points of view and is usually expensive. As the SCM tool used currently is a very simple tool providing only basic support, the need for more advanced support is recognized and the division has therefore begun with the replacement of RCS with ClearCase.

As a pure software development organization, the division does not feel any need for support from PDM, and a possible use of PDM has not been considered.

This case illustrates a situation in which many software companies are today. The complexity of software development constantly increases, and this requires new investment in software development support. Simple SCM tools such as RCS have proven to be very efficient and flexible to date, but they now demonstrate limitations in managing complex processes. New investments can be made in the development of internal additions to the basic SCM tools or by buying new, more advanced tools. Pure software companies with a relatively simple production process feel no need for product management tools.

Further reading about concurrent development and distributed development of software can be found in Sections 3.2.6 and 3.2.7, respectively. The specific tools mentioned, RCS and ClearCase, are shortly described in Chapter 10.

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