The Mentor Graphics IC Station and Falcon environments come out "out-of-the-box" as incredibly flexible and powerful toolkits. When initially loaded, IC Station provides adequate capabilities for polygon editing, but becomes a much more productive device-based layout system with AMPLE, CUI, C and C+ customizations by users. With the flexibility comes all the problems associated with software design management: implementation, testing, version and revision control, documentation. This paper outlines several of these issues, how they manifest themselves in the course of IC Station customization, and some potential solutions to managing a customized environment.

Bio:
Eric O'Connor is a Member of Technical Staff at VistaCAD, a division of Vista Technologies, Inc. He has been involved in several projects concerned with customizing the Mentor Graphics environment for use with specific customers' applications. These projects have involved AMPLE coding of user-interfaces, as well as C code development. Before joining VistaCAD, Eric was employed as a software engineer at Raytheon Corporation. Eric is a graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and also hold a Master's degree from Northeastern University in Boston, MA.