Configuration management from the perspective of integrated circuit design

An integral component of all phases of the design process is configuration management (CM), which is concerned with identification, control, status accounting and audits. Over half a century since its establishment, there are now two fundamental architectures and a wide diversity of automated tools supporting CM application. In this paper, we present and evaluate these architectures and the top five CM tools in terms of market share, offer reasons for switching from one architecture to another in the context of software development and qualify their relevance from the perspective of integrated circuit design. We show detailed measurements comparing the two primary representatives of centralized and decentralized CM tools: Apache´s Subversion^® and Git (open source). The analysis is based on both theoretical benchmarks and a real-world data set.