Moving a da system from development to production

The problems of mov ing a design automation system from the development phase to the production usage are always numerous, varied, and continuing. Lawrence Livermore Laboratory is a research laboratory, and design automation supports engineering design and fabrication in a slightly different fashion than for a high- volume commercial shop. Jobs are characterized by being quite varied in requirements, requiring fast turnaround, having very low production quantities, having few design constraints, and, in general, place the requirement on the DA system to be very fleK ible and at the same time to be responsive to requests made on the system by the users. Yet, the problems of making a DA system production ready in the above situation is probably very similar to the problems encountered in other environments. In the following, I will describe some of the d ifficulties we have faced in the past year in moving a printed circuit board layout DA system from a research and development stage to a production usage.