Creativity and control have always been at odds. Designers require freedom while management needs conformance to policies. This has traditionally divided design management tools and solutions into mutually exclusive categories of configuration management versus process management or those of work-in-progress versus PDM. As we move to a world of Intellectual Property (IP), these problems move into a sharper focus as, suddenly, the distinction between work-in-progress and finished product becomes unclear and the creativity is distributed outside of organizational domains.

The Design Evolution concept approaches this dual problem by data-centric process guidance. The product development problem is seen as a gradual refinement or evolution of the constituents until the whole product is in a 'golden' state. This appears to scale well from an individual designer's workspace to in-house teamwork and to global multi-organizational IP factories.

In this paper we will discuss how this approach addresses theoretical and practical problems associated with the various aspects of product development:

• Design quality vs. time to market
• Size and complexity of data vs. the need to visualize it
• Proprietary formats vs. the need to treat them generically
• The value of software configuration management tools versus their lack of understanding of EDA data
• Design recipes that need to work versus senior designers=D5 need to craft their own styles
• Gathering useful metrics without getting in the way of design
• Celebrating individual design excellence without reducing rest of the team to cheer leaders
• Arranging a meeting of minds across global campuses
• Care and feeding of Intellectual Property

Bio:
Madhav Nerurkar is the engineering manager for Design Evolution, a product line he started at Mentor Graphics. Previously he led data management software development projects at Mentor Graphics and earlier at Chips and Technologies. Madhav was introduced to data management for EDA at Intel in 1986, after receiving a Masters from the department of EE at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, and a Masters from the department of Computer Science at Louisiana State University. It is his professional goal to solve the problem of design management for the EDA industry.