Product lifecycle management is a well-adopted methodology used in mechanical design. Until recently, it was not widely used in the semiconductor industry. That all changed when Methodics created intellectual property lifecycle management or IPLM, a design-centric mechanism for tracking and analysis of semiconductor IP and design. The result is a workspace for chip designers who often reuse existing IP.

Methodics was acquired by Perforce in 2020 and continues its quest to complete the digital thread, a traceable system from product definition and requirements all the way through semiconductor development.

Methodics founder and CEO Simon Butler is now general manager of the Methodics Business unit at Perforce, a member of the ESD Alliance, a SEMI Technology Community. Simon and I recently discussed  the Methodics by Perforce survey of semiconductor design professionals that identified challenges, trends and opportunities in 2022. What follows is a condensed version of our discussion.
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Over the past three years, the ESD Alliance’s License Management and Anti-Piracy (LMA) Committee has worked with member companies Cadence, Siemens EDA and Synopsys to develop a protocol for use with software license management systems to provide strong protection against piracy by defining how servers can be uniquely identified.

Sashi Subramanian, senior group director at Cadence, chairs the LMA and leads the development of the SEMI Server Certification Protocol. In my recent conversation with Sashi, we discuss the driving factors behind the creation of this new protocol, the challenges of bringing it to market and a status update.

Smith: What is a server certification protocol? What is its purpose?

Subramanian: The protocol is a means by which compute servers that run license server software can be uniquely identified. The purpose is to thwart software piracy that relies on cloning server identifications by allowing only entitled instances of license server software to run.
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