Simultaneously meeting customer project specifications while maximizing profitability is a complex task in modern semiconductor design organizations; an optimal set of design decisions must be chosen from an infinite set of possible alternatives. Parts proliferation must be contained, future customer needs anticipated and lead times compressed. Just consolidating all of the information into a digestible summary that can be analyzed is an overwhelming challenge. To overcome this, an integrated project and portfolio management solution that can automate the gathering and organization of your semiconductor design project data is required.

The Silicon Thinking Portfolio and Project Management solution provides advanced workflows and templates to automate resource-planning activities and institutionalize best practices for complex semiconductor development projects. Collaborative project management capabilities dramatically increase the productivity of globally distributed users. Projects and programs can be driven with real-time information that update automatically with direct links to tasks, documents, deliverables, and other data. These automatic updates enable project managers to focus on high value activities, instead of tracking down status. Assigning access to specific protected information is simplified, removing roadblocks to on-boarding development teams, which protecting company intellectual property.

Companies can provide global teams with accurate, real-time information to keep projects on track and respond to ever-shrinking product lifecycles. Project dashboards provide management with real-time visibility into overall schedule, phases, gates, resources, costs, and benefits. Better decisions are made when analyzing which projects offer the highest potential return on investment.

Semiconductor defects are most often inserted into a new design during the requirements planning phase. Further, more than 40% of projects fail or are abandoned because of requirements traceability and management issues. The resolution to these issues lies in the use of centralized requirements traceability solutions to assure consistency in the requirements management process.

The Silicon Thinking Requirement, Traceability and Test solution enables organizations to improve their overall global requirement management process by capturing the “voice of the customer” and translating it into user requirements for new semiconductor products. Automated requirement management, traceability to test cases and automatic impact analysis on changes are enabled. A central repository contains all customer requirements and associated product specifications that satisfy them.

With this solution, organizations are able to drive consistency across design teams when capturing customer, regulatory standards and market-driven requirements. Requirements can be defined and decomposed into hierarchies and then fulfilled through the design, implementation and testing of final products to assure 100% requirement fulfillment. Companies reduce development costs and rework by bridging the gap between product requirements and engineering disciplines.

It connects to more than 60 requirements authoring applications and data sources and then automates the painful tasks to provide all the data needed to be prove compliance with the most demanding and challenging standards including DO178B, ISO26262, IEC61508, IEC62304, 21CFR820.30, CMMI, and Spice.

Your customers often see bugs or issues found in their integrated circuits as singular issues – simple to understand, easy to resolve. But within a semiconductor design and manufacturing operation, especially one with a distributed development environment, with perhaps hundreds of engineers at multiple world-wide sites contributing dozens of IP blocks, thousands of issues and defects may need to be managed at the same time. The concurrent resolution of these issues requires a centralized process that manages the interdependencies of the issues, the allocation of resolution personnel and the overall impact on operations and business success.

The Silicon Thinking Issue, Defect and Change Management solution provides semiconductor design organizations a single system to manage reported-problem integrity and change accountability to enable design and manufacturing issue resolution. With this solution, all product development stakeholders can raise and resolve issues from any geographical location or any role in the organization. Issues are all identified, assigned to owners, tracked (reported upon) and resolved in a seamless, common platform. To keep the entire enterprise synchronized, issues can spawn formal change processes for engineering and manufacturing.

Any design element can be identified as an affected item of an issue or a change. In order to reduce change cycle time, suppliers and customers can participate in the issue and change management processes as required. The Issue, Defect and Change Management solution provides High-Tech / Electronic companies with an end-to-end issue and change management solution and process that include identification, resolution, prevention, reporting and trending.

Semiconductor design is exceedingly complex. In order to produce integrated circuits (ICs) that are competitive, design companies now use specialized design teams and complex design workflows to maximize productivity and value from their engineers. As a result complex hierarchical designs and distributed design centers are now every-day realities of IC product design. To ensure this organization and process matrix succeeds, the right foundation of collaborative design and information systems is essential. It must scale across large, distributed teams, support intellectual property (IP) reuse and variant optimization, be applicable for multiple application platforms and keep designers “designing” and minimize information access and management overhead.

The Silicon Thinking Semiconductor Collaborative Design solution is used today by over 120 development organizations, including 13 of the top 15 semiconductor companies to boost design productivity.

Based upon ENOVIA® Synchronicity® DesignSync®, it efficiently manages design data for an entire design organization. The solution enables design teams to manage data at both a detailed design element level and at the project level. Detailed design elements are encapsulated as “modules” which can then be easily and efficiently integrated to the final design. This modular approach differentiates the solution from other Design Data Management (DDM) systems. Design data contributed by individual teams can be seamlessly integrated into higher level designs.

The solution also includes technology from ENOVIA® Pinpoint to enable deep design analysis. Structured placement and visualization solutions for integrated circuit designs help engineers achieve higher chip performance for microprocessors, graphics circuits and DSP subsystems at 65nm, 45nm, and below. Web-enabled collaboration, access, and implementation provides easy access to distributed team members.

Ever-shrinking form factors, more complex product integration (e.g System-on-a-Chip, System-in-Package) and growing environmental compliance demands make semiconductor package performance and reliability improvement ever more challenging. Virtual testing using realistic simulation software offers packaging engineers the ability to assure requirement compliance while minimizing total product cost and time to market. Virtual testing is orders of magnitude faster than physical testing, and reduces costly overhead and time-consuming test setup.

The Silicon Thinking Semiconductor Packaging Simulation solution reduces the need for fabricating test prototypes by substituting virtual testing and lifecycle prediction. This industry solution experience is based on the SIMULIA Unified Abaqus FEA application suite and provides advanced material models for electronics applications. Modern progressive fracture/failure capabilities, best-in-class solver performance and interactive programming capabilities enable efficient model generation and preparation. Supported simulation methods enable robust coupled-field analysis of thermal, electrical, mechanical (both static and dynamic) and moisture-sensitivity load regimes. Multiple load types can be applied to a single model and techniques are available to efficiently handle different size scales typically found in electronic assemblies. Engineers are able to predict complex real-world behavior with best-in-class steady-state and transient analyses. Errors are detected early in the design process resulting in huge savings in time and costs. The solution provides detailed insight into the product behavior under a variety of manufacturing, shipping and operating conditions such as manufacturing/assembly loads, shipping and handling conditions, operating conditions and material characterization.