Getting Organized

One software program is widely used to design complicated and sophisticated computer chip circuitry, and to test the design in software before building any silicon. This program has been around forever, and most old-line chip manufacturers have used it for years. As chip design gets more complicated, new features keep getting added to this program.

Traditionally, software developers updated the program documentation by tacking new feature onto the end of the existing document, and sending it to existing customers to place at the end of their binder. This way, the software company would not to have to reprint and send out the existing portions of the document with each new software update.

After more than 20 years of this product, there were more than 4,000 pages of program documentation…with no table of contents or index. And it was all printed; no electronic or web-based version. A bigger problem: new electronics companies in Asia and elsewhere, companies that hadn’t even existed 20 years earlier, didn’t have any of the old pages.

No customer, new or old, could find the information they needed, when they needed it, to get their new chip designs developed, tested, built, and off to market in a timely manner.

In talking to customers who used this chip-design and chip-validation software, I found that most chip makers had 6 basic stages in their chip design and validation process. And the product designers were different people at each of these six stages, so most of the existing documentation was irrelevant to their particular phase of product development. The unneeded documentation was taking up too much shelf space on too many work benches.

So, working closely with the software developers, I determined which parts of the code were used in each of the six main design and validation phases. I then reorganized all 4000 pages of documentation into six separate manuals, one for each phase of chip development. I then further refined the six books, organizing each software instruction in the typical order they would be used. I then indexed everything…and I put it all online so it could also be searched.

4000 pages of completely unmanageable documentation now became easy to use, easy to search…and customer time to market for new chip designs was typically cut by 20%.