Taking a look at your Design Execution

Warning Signs of Trouble

Project Tip #3 - Developing Best Practices

Is your design team as affective as it can be? How do you know if there is room for improvement? This issue will deal with methods of ensuring your design team is properly tuned up for top-notch execution.

What are the indications that your design team is in need of a tune up? Seven times out of ten you will find that the majority of your issues stem from communications issues both within design and external to design. These are easily noted when you hear statements from the team that start with "I thought", "Didn't we", "When did", "As I recall", "Who was" and so on. These all indicate something was not detailed out that should have been.

The remaining 30% of your issues will stem from missing capabilities in your design flow that is not allowing the design validation to identify tissues. These are much more difficult to ferret out because engineers like to engineer around issues. It's in their blood. If your silicon is coming out and has a bug that is not related to spec (communications issue) you have a tool flow issue. This is an ideal topic at the lessons learned meeting with your design team.

That's about all there is to your trouble areas. The team is either failing to communicate effectively or you do not have a tool/flow capability in place for thorough design validation. Sounds pretty simple, doesn't it? You have some work to do in finding the communication disconnects and lacking tool/flow capabilities and eliminating them. It will not be easy but once your design team sees the benefits, they will be much more participative in improvement discussions down the road.

Best practices are simply an agreement by the team as to how they will be doing their design work. In the design world there are many right ways of doing things. If your team is not doing their work in the same "right" way you will have nasty surprises when all their good work comes together into the complete design. Best Practices are simply a way of formalizing the way the team is going to do things.

Best practices should cover items such as valid schematic view types, valid reference libraries, design kit release version, valid design tools and versions, sim corners to be run, aging sims to be run etc. The list goes on and on from here. If it is a procedure the designers are doing, agree upon it and then capture it in your best practices. Anything left out will leave you open for surprises once your design comes together.

The best way to get your design team engaged on this is to have them ALL in a room together and discuss each one of the tools in your flow. Discuss the how to of each and drive to closure of how the team will cover it. You will be amazed at how much discussion there will be and the differences of opinions! If you did not have this meeting they would all be doing it their way. The project would be moving along great and then at integration things would fall apart and the schedule would start slipping away. along great and then at integration things would fall apart and the schedule would start slipping away.