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UNIX* to NT* Migration and NT-UNIX Cross-Platform Challenges

The complexity of the existing UNIX-based design environment at Intel makes it impractical to convert to a homogeneous NT environment in one step. The viable solution is to develop a heterogeneous UNIX-NT integrated design environment and convert more and more UNIX-centric components to IA-NT over time.

As with the migration of any operating system, the migration of an existing UNIX-based CAD design environment to a mixed NT-UNIX design environment presents us with a number of technical challenges of which the major ones are as follows:

1. New applications developed for or ported to NT depend on reusable components available only on UNIX. These reusable components include
   • external vendor tools and libraries
   • internal libraries that have not been ported or are not portable to NT
   • legacy design data in a database that can only be accessed on a specific UNIX platform
2. Design flows that execute a set of tools, all of which may not be available on a single platform.
3. The demand for common infrastructure scripts to drive the tools on both UNIX and NT is difficult to meet since the scripting environment on NT is not fully mature and is not 100% compatible with the UNIX scripting environment.
4. How to maintain a single test system and test vectors for cross-platform validation.