Mia is a layout design manager based in New York. Currently, she is under a lot of pressure because she has been handed over a complex and high-visibility chip design project for an important customer that can possibly land the organization a big contract. Mia has a team of efficient layout design engineers (designers) who are based in two geographies, New York and New Delhi. Mia needs to quickly come up with a plan to effectively utilize the available workforce to meet the deadline and to deliver an error-free solution.

Let’s see how Mia uses Virtuoso Concurrent Layout (CLE) to have her team members work in parallel on a single design across geographies.

In this story, we have:

	Mia – Layout Design Manager based in New York, U.S.A.
	Terrell – Layout Design Engineer based in New York, U.S.A.
	Dev and Neena – Layout Design Engineers based in New Delhi, India
	Gautam – Product Engineer at Cadence Design Systems based in Edinburgh, Scotland

Gautam on a phone call with Mia.
Gautam walks Mia through the CLE flow and shows her how to create design partitions, enabling each team member to work in their defined scope and how each designer can collaborate by previewing each others changes. He also shows her how the designers can submit their work and how she can merge and review the updates made by them, and how only when she is sure about the updates, she can save them to the top design.
After speaking to Gautam, Mia analyses her design and comes up with a plan...
Team: To ensure that work happens round-the-clock, she decides to work with three more team members, two in the USA (Mia and Terrell) and two in New Delhi, India (Dev and Neena). Design Partitions: She creates four design partitions cle_p1, cle_p2, cle_p3, and cle_p4. Ownership Topcell (Manager) – Mia (As a housekeeper, Mia is responsible for coordinating with all team members. She reviews, runs health checks, and merges the changes into the top design. She has also assigned herself a design partition for editing.) cle_p1 – Mia cle_p2 –Terrell cle_p3 – Dev cle_p4 – Neena	Mia sets up a meeting with all the team members to explain the tasks that need to be done in their respective design partitions. After the discussion, Mia uses the day to set up everything for Neena and Dev to start work and signed off for the day.
Works starts in New Delhi the next day...
	Dev and Neena start working in their respective design partitions. They save their edits and collaborate by previewing each other's work as needed. At the end of the day, they submit their changes.
A few hours later, in the New York office…
Mia has been waiting to get back to office to check the progress on the design. She merges the updates received from the New Delhi team, runs a health check on the merged design partitions, and saves the changes into the top design view. She also leaves some comments for the New Delhi team to work on when they are back in office.
Mia and Terrell now begin editing in their design partitions and continue with their tasks. They submit the updates for merge at the end of their day.	Mia again merges the updates she and Terrell have completed and runs some usual health checks to ensure the design looks good. She makes some more notes to share with the team.
Mia sets up a daily status meeting at the start of her day, which is also the end of the work day in New Delhi, to discuss any issues and to make plans...
This cycle between the two geographical locations continues until the final milestone is reached. Mia saves the final version of the top design with all the updates and clears the design partition views because the design is now ready for tape out.
In the last status call for the project...
Mia in call with Gautam...

How CLE Worked Well for the Team

A project successfully completed within the deadline. Let’s see how the team managed the project:

• Round-the-clock work without overtime: Mia and her team worked round-the-clock by working in New York from 8:00 AM to 4:30 PM EDT and in New Delhi from 12:00 AM to 8:30 AM EDT (9:30 AM to 6:00 PM IST).

• Reduced turnaround time: With four designers working in parallel, the team was able to complete four times more work in a single day. This helped them considerably bring down the turnaround time.

• Fewer chances of errors and rollbacks: As Mia had the final say, updates did not make it to the top design until they were approved and thoroughly checked, minimizing the chances of errors. This feature is especially useful when you are working with new layout design engineers who are likely to introduce unexpected errors. When a design manager has the final say in what is checked into the top design, instances of rollbacks due to issues are minimized - and we would like to call this a happy side effect of using Virtuoso Concurrent Layout for editing your layout designs.

For years, layout designers have been faced with the challenges of cell-based design hierarchies. While these cells establish ownership and represent entities that can be stored in today’s design management systems, they also represent hard limitations to the full utilization of designer resources. The existing editing model of a single designer per layout cell causes underutilization of layout resources and delays. 

By using CLE, design teams can continue to utilize layout resources for many layout tasks, such as DRC cleanup and routing, right up to the tape out deadline. CLE enables more than one designer to work in a hierarchy at the same time. Using CLE is a way to fully utilize your existing workforce at a time when they would traditionally become idle due to the limitations of single user cell editing.

Related Resources

User Guide	Virtuoso Concurrent Layout User Guide
Rapid Adoption Kits	Virtuoso Concurrent Layout Editing
Blogs	Virtuosity: Concurrently Editing a Hierarchical Cellview Virtuoso: The Next Overture – Concurrent Layout – a New Methodology for Team Design

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Happy Reading!

Sucharita Mehta

With Brock Moore, Gautam Kumar, and Brian LaBorde