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In IC Design House, CAD department is not just a support department but a department that influences the productivity, schedule and yield of a company. When build up a CAD environment, it must consider some factors, such like cost, IC design product type , system extending, flexibility, recovery and backup in different regions. As semiconductor manufacturing enhances its ability, CAD environment in IC Design House needs more investment. How to plan a budget for CAD environment is the main topic of this research. There are three different portions in CAD environment:1. Software: include Electronic Design Automation (EDA);2. Hardware: network equipments, workstations, servers, Network Attach Storage (NAS), plotters, printers, tape storages and UPS; 3. Operation Systems: UNIX or LINUX. This research uses case study to interview with four IC design companies and a hardware provider and analysis these interview data. These data can show the CAD architectures of four different cases, find out the problems which can be improved, find the difficult of CAD environment implementation and understand the satisfactions of users and CAD engineers. The findings of this research shows that a small IC design company can not build up a satisfy environment when company initiation. The most important reason is cost efficiency and corporate strategy. On the contrary, a big IC design company has plenty budget and build up a better CAD environment than that of a small company. Hence, a small company needs engineers who have know-how to build up a CAD environment.
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