Getting back into any market after a few years’ absence is a challenge, especially when it’s the hyper-competitive, high-volume, low-margin consumer market. But Infineon, which had years of experience selling Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) chipsets into that space saw opportunity to re-assert itself in the global market.

But how does a semiconductor design team approach the challenge when its size is limited by a fixed budget and the delivery date was set in stone? Infineon engaged with Numetrics to tackle the design challenge, and it ended up achieving 20 percent higher productivity than other projects. Read this case study to learn how Numetrics’ software and methodology helped Infineon gets its DECT project to market.

The case study is among several you can find here on the Numetrics site.

Does the Infineon experience resonate with you?

The phrase “top gun” generally refers to hot-shot fighter pilots performing amazing feats high in the sky, but increasingly it’s being used to describe great engineering managers doing amazing things on land. Numetrics has put together an online seminar covering the best practices of leading IC project planners.

The webinar describes eight techniques used by top-gun engineering managers, followed by a demonstration of Numetrics’ NMX-ERP™ solution and IC Industry Database containing more than 1400 completed IC designs from multiple industry segments.

The webinar presented the following best practices:

1. Computing IC complexity statistically
2. Estimation of resource requirements based on models
3. Rigorous “what-if” analysis for schedule / resource optimization
4. Benchmarking project execution assumptions
5. Determining the most aggressive, yet achievable project plan
6. Quantitatively assessing the schedule / resource implications of each feature request
7. Performing root-cause analysis at the project close milestone
8. Foreseeing resource shortfalls across the project pipeline.

The demonstration showed a live application of the Numetrics toolset, through a realistic scenario involving balancing IC specification and resource availability in the context of a fixed schedule.

You may view the webinar at http://techonline.stream57.com/numetrics/.

For more information, please e-mail info@numetrics.com

Summary: Everybody wants to increase productivity. But there’s no free lunch: assigning too few resources to a project increases stress and creates schedule risk.

Productivity excellence is the process of maximizing productivity by setting the most aggressive targets that are still achievable. Achievable targets mean that you will meet your schedule goals. Aggressive means that everyone will be working really hard to get there. The combination ensures that your products will come to market at the earliest possible time, given hard, focused work from a team no larger than you need.

The value of productivity excellence is felt in three main areas.

• First, in these tough economic times, you can be sure you haven’t spent money on resources that are not essential to your project.
• Second, you have set the bar appropriately for an ambitious, capable engineering team.
• Third, you have controlled schedule risk, and minimized the likelihood of a schedule slip, with potentially disastrous implications for revenues and market share.

At the end of the day, productivity excellence means meeting your business goals efficiently, with a motivated workforce doing their best to meet an aggressive, but still feasible plan. Take a look at our customer case study involving Innovasic, which maximized its design throughput by benchmarking
microcontroller development team productivity.