It just hit me today at how some of the most popular software in the world is automatically updated on a regular basis to fix bugs and add new features, software like:
- Microsoft Operating Systems and Applications
- Quicken for finance
- Turbo Tax
- Plaxo for networking
- Java
So the big question for me then is, why doesn’t the EDA development community offer something similar to automatic updates?
If a bug with high severity is fixed on a Monday, then why don’t I get an auto update on Tuesday?
I did have a positive experience with the ispLEVER software from FGPA vendor Lattice where it notified me when they updated versions. That was nice.
It seems like mature EDA tools are only updated maybe once per year (i.e. schematic capture), while start-ups often release updates once per month because of the high rate of new features.
Let me know if your EDA vendor is update-friendly.
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16 users commented in " Automatic Updates for EDA "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackInteresting idea. I guess it’s different for EDA because
* SW Quality is lower for EDA than for most PC applications. It’s probably because of the great complexity and/or small user base for EDA.
* EDA is “mission critical”, so the consequences of an update breaking something are substantial. It’s no big deal to back off the update of my web browser, but I can’t retract a tapeout due to an error in an STA tool!
Therefore, updates are more deliberate, less frequent, and more closely scrutinized before adoption.
JohnB
What if the EDA company sent me an email for each new release along with a list of bug fixes and new features? They could even include a link so that I could start the download process.
Daniel
That’s sort of what we have set up — we get an email from the EDA vendor announcing the release. There will be Release Notes describing what’s changed. And there will be a link to ftp the tarball.
But the Release Notes can be long, with lots of obscure issues addressed, and sometimes the details of an issue aren’t disclosed because it’s another customer’s problem.
EDA vendors try to prevent customers from sharing information. Sometimes that’s necessary to protect our business, but sometimes it seems like it serves the EDA vendor to “divide and conquer” customer complaints.
John,
How often are these updates?
Do you have to run your own internal QA to verify that the new release does no harm?
I’m just curious how the EDA vendors are providing continual improvement in a timely manner.
Updates every six weeks or so, unless you need a fix for a show-stopper. Our internal qualification of the release is not as rigorous as I’d like. For mission-critical jobs like STA sign-off, we may be very conservative about changing versions, unless we know the version in use is “broke”.
I like that frequency of updates every six weeks because it tells me that a lot innovation is still happening in that product.
I can recall some EDA clients in Japan and Taiwan had substantial QA regression suites and ran them every new release and nailed us when we still had blatant bugs.
Our company does exactly what you have described.
We do frequent updates and enhancements, available to all users.
We notify users by email that the update is available, listing bug fixes and new features.
Users can download the new release. In most cases they can “roll back” the the previous release if necessary.
Mark M at Micro Magic.
Analog Rails gives the user the ability to update when launching the tool. We release next week.
Mentor Graphics announces new releases and patches every week in its technical newsletter, SupportPro.
All users with current support contracts receive SupportPro (unless they have opted out), and users can customize SupportPro so that they receive release notices and new solutions for just the products they are interested in. SupportPro provides links to download new releases, patches, Release Highlights and Release Notes.
Mark Mc
Mentor Graphics
Links to patches and releases are OK however taking ease-of-use just one step further would:
1) Alert me of a new release after I invoke the tool.
2) Let me click to auto-update.
3) Let me continue working while updating.
4) Let me know when the new version is ready to use.
This is exactly how Altium handles updates. Each time the application is invoked, it can optionally check for any updtaes. They are downloaded and installed per user control and request.
It isn’t that hard, just different from the traditional EDA model.
Altium has their act together on automatic updates, sounds very friendly and intuitive.
Well done.
SpectaReg.com provides a Software as a Service (SaaS) EDA tool for register management and it is updated on a regular basis with no update effort required from the user base.
That’s odd to hear, I thought it was standard capability these days, even in EDA. We’re a small company and our Eclipse tools generate FPGA bitstreams for our SystemBIST configuration device ( http://www.intellitech.com/products/systembist.asp ), our JTAG tools, silicon debuggers and flash programmers all have automatic updates. The updates are fixes, new features or new models. It checks at startup at the user option (some customers are not connected to the internet!)
After a couple bad experiences, I no longer update EDA tools mid-project unless there is a show-stopping bug. In fact, after instituting that policy, I can’t remember updating a EDA tool mid-project. I’d rather work around a known bug or feature limitation than deal with the turmoil of a new version plus the possibility of finding new tool bugs late in the project.
If an EDA tool was pushing updates on me, I would and have dropped the tool for something I have more control over.
Getting feature changes and new bugs in my web browser every few weeks doesn’t threaten the schedule and success of a $1M tapeout.
Thanks for the practical advice. The bugs that you know are more acceptable than the bugs that you don’t know.
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