CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
28 May 2008
Company News
Thales and Mentor Graphics Halve Time-to-Productivity for New Design Engineers
Mentor Graphics Corporation and Thales UK’s engineering and process management (EPM) business have developed an integrated tool and methodology training course which halves the time-to-productivity for new engineers. Thales estimates that up to a hundred engineers could be trained this way over the coming year.
Previously, Thales’ Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) design engineers received three separate training courses. Mentor Graphics worked with Thales to create a training course that would integrate Hardware Description Language (HDL) theory, tool application and familiarization with Thales’ in-house methodology. Whereas it typically took six months for a new recruit to undertake the three courses it should now take a maximum of three months and by combining the courses the number of training hours is reduced by 40%.
Thales UK’s optronics business in Glasgow has successfully piloted the course, and it will now be extended to the Staines and Bury St Edmunds sites, then two further sites from the land and joint systems business, Crawley and Wells. It will be made available to the rest of Thales UK’s sites and discussions are underway to provide the course across other European sites via Thales’ France-based EPM team.
Instead of off-the-shelf tool training a combined team from Mentor Graphics Education Services and Thales’ EPM business jointly deliver the bespoke course for Thales engineers. The EPM business maintains a range of ‘Workbenches’, workflows accessed through a Thales-developed Graphical User Interface (GUI). In the case of the FPGA Workbench this contains tools from Mentor Graphics, including the HDL Designer™ tool, the ModelSim® tool, and the Precision® Synthesis tool. The GUI guides engineers to follow Thales design rules, configuration and library management conventions and other aspects of best practice and standardisation such as DO254.
Thales has a major graduate recruitment programme underway and the course will be an important part of the induction process, but it is also intended as a refresher for existing Thales engineers adopting FPGA Workbench. The new course will accelerate the rollout of FPGA Workbench across Thales sites, since the Workbench methodology will be imparted at the same time as tool training, generating the following benefits:
• New engineers will be productive sooner
• Better engineering resource management by enabling existing engineers to swap between projects more easily
• Encourage wider use of newer techniques, e.g. assertions, self-checking testbenches
• Cut verification time by reducing bugs through standardizing best practice
• Enhanced overall management as Workbench generates live project metrics
• Reduction in training costs
Andrew Parmley, head of electronics at Thales UK’s optronics business, says: “Integrating company-specific methodology instruction with tool training is a no-brainer decision. It gets engineers productive quickly, cuts training administration and allows us to standardize best practice so that engineers can move easily between projects to put design resources where they are needed.”
Adrian Buckley, General Manager of Mentor Graphics Western Europe, comments: “Our investment in this partnership approach to bespoke training makes sense because our aim is to deliver solid business outcomes for our user base. This is a transferable approach to training which we are also able to offer to other customers.”
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