Subversion(r): Empirical Design Methodology from the Perspective of Integrated Circuit Design

An aspect of primary significance in integrated circuit (IC) design is configuration management of design data, i.e., the task of keeping a project comprising a multiplicity of revisions well organized. Apache's Subversion(r) is a software tool that can facilitate this task. It manages revisions of documentation, source code, and a wide variety of files, and it automates storing and retrieving revisions. Unfortunately, Subversion(r) provides insufficient support for IC projects consisting of large numbers of managed items. We address this problem by introducing, discussing, and demonstrating several approaches that improve the performance of Subversion(r) when handling a vast amount of files and directories. Our approaches are division of the working copy into smaller pieces with a decent granularity, conversion of the working copy into a single tarball file, and implementation of a referred central working copy. Each method is incorporated into the configuration management flow through a lifecycle of IC development, which offers the opportunity to compare and validate each technique.