Stream Manager, an Answer to Academic Project Policy

In electrical engineering graduate schools, integrated circuit design is usually taught through lectures, tutorials, projects and practical works. During these courses, the reference to electronic design automation software is essential. However, it is during the projects that the students acquire the most of their know-how in this field: since these project topics are given by industrialists or researchers, students are able to develop their skills in computer-aided design software in the field of microelectronics. However, these future engineers are often unconscious of the configuration problems, which are generally the task of the system administrator. These softwares are often running under some UNIX flavor and the skill to configure them is not very common. Therefore, EDA vendors often provide configuration scripts. But, and this is even truer in the educational world, one must often switch between different EDA software from the same user account. Unfortunately, this can lead to some configuration conflicts, even when these softwares are coming from the same vendor. The objective of this paper is to suggest the use of cadence stream manager to assist students in their configuration tasks and to help the CAD system administrator in solving some configuration problems