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30 The PCB Design Magazine • July 2014 Conclusion In this article we have reviewed best prac- tices and processes that can be applied to as- sist and, in fact, embolden EDA tool managers, engineers, and PCB designers to move forward with multi-site concurrent design. By investing the time to create a proper foundation with a standardized global EDA environment, then adding an EDM system that truly understands how to manage your ECAD data, you will be well on your way to sharing, reusing, and con- currently designing across all of your product centers. In the end, you will benefit from a new level of collaboration between globally-distributed design centers, while also realizing tangen- tial effects like promoting the documentation and sharing of engineering best practices and common processes for the benefit of all design teams in all regions. At the end of the day, you and your design team need to decide: do you want to be a leader or a follower? PCBDESIgN Craig Armenti is senior technical marketing manager for PCB products at zuken. feature MULTI-SITE CONCURRENT DESIgN: TIPS AND BEST PRACTICES continues For years, li-shiuan Peh, the singapore re- search Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer science at MiT, has argued that the massively multicore chips of the future will need to resemble little internets, where each core has an associated router, and data travels between cores in packets of fixed size. This week, at the international symposium on Computer Architec - ture, Peh's group unveiled a 36-core chip that features just such a "net- work-on-chip." The chip's 36 cores are given differ- ent, hierarchical priorities. say, for in- stance, that during one interval, both core 1 and core 10 issue requests, but core 1 has a higher priority. Core 32's router may receive core 10's request well before it receives core 1's. But it will hold it until it's passed along 1's. Cache coherence in multicore chips "is a big problem, and it's one that gets larger all the time," says Todd Austin, a professor of electrical engi - neering and computer science at the university of Michigan. "Their contribution is an interesting one: They're saying, 'let's get rid of a lot of the complexity that's in existing networks. That will create more avenues for communication, and our clever com- munication protocol will sort out all the details.' it's a much simpler approach and a faster ap- proach. it's a really clever idea." "Tiled" 36-core Chip Unveiled Figure 5: Do you want to be a leader or a follower?