For Designers: * Greater Productivity Through Visualization and Control * Dependency Awareness for Faster TurnAround-Time For Infrastructure * Greater Resource Utilization Through Parallel Execution: * Small Memory Footprint & Built-in Scheduler for Greater Scalability For Management: * Reduced Flow Complexity for Higher Quality of Results * Flow Standardization and Better Collaboration * Greater Productivity * FlowTracer is a complete system that can be used to create, manage, and execute Design Flows. It captures and updates the design flow by interacting with the tools while they are executing the commands contained in the flow. This unique technique to manage the dependencies between files and tools is called Runtime Tracing. * FlowTracer features a color-coded graphical userinterface, which provides designers with accurate insight into their design flows. A powerful Grid View report presents the results of millions of jobs running and highlights failing jobs as red pixels, which can be quickly identified, debugged and resolved. FlowTracer’s powerful Flow Description Language (FDL) allows users to describe design flows in a simple and readable format, removing complexities associated with traditional scripts or Makefiles. * FlowTracer's user interface provides designers with increased visibility, navigation and control. FlowGraph presents a unique, color-coded live view. Designers can "cone-up" to identify what their job depends on, or "cone down" to see what other jobs are dependent on theirs. * FlowTracer’s dependency awareness only allows jobs to be executed when all prior dependency requirements are met, enabling designers to quickly identify the root cause of failing jobs, take the appropriate corrective action, and continue running the jobs from the point of failure. The ability to stop and restart jobs in mid-flow allows designers to make course corrections without having to restart their jobs * Design Acceleration - FlowTracer is designed to support design flows of any size ranging from IP or Design Library Characterization to Design Verification or Physical Design. With a small memory footprint and built-in scheduler, FlowTracer runs multiple processes across multiple servers, providing a scalable solution capable of handling millions of jobs in memory and thousands running simultaneously. Additionally, FlowTracer uncovers the built-in parallelism used in today’s complex design flows for greater resource efficiency.

* Helps protect your team from accidental file loss. * Allows back-tracking to earlier versions of a file. * Supports branching, sharing, merging, and management of file releases. * Tracks versions of entire projects. * Tracks modular code (one file that is reused, or shared, by multiple projects). * Visual SourceSafe allows the quick and efficient sharing of files among projects. The organization of files into projects makes team coordination intuitive. * Using the Visual SourceSafe automation interfaces, you can write extensions based on Visual SourceSafe as needed for your environment. Extensions are usually provided in the form of stand-alone applications written to the automation interfaces. You can also extend Visual SourceSafe functionality by writing an add-in or plug-in that is compatible with the integrated development environment (IDE) of the third-party program that will run the software package.