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Numetrics Announces enhancements for Leveraging Numetrics’ NMX IC Industry Database™

Cupertino, Calif., 2006 September 15

Numetrics Management Systems, Inc., the exclusive provider of tools and databases for benchmarking IC development capability of semiconductor companies, announced a host of new features and capabilities for its benchmarking and root cause analysis products. Numetrics’ NMX IC Industry Database™ comprises performance metrics on more than 1,000 IC projects released to volume production by over 30 major semiconductor and electronics companies.

Executive Summary

Numetrics-NMX™, a suite of tools for IC project planning, lifecycle management and performance benchmarking, leverages a robust industry database of completed IC projects that provides users with unparalleled capability to benchmark their IC product development capabilities against the industry. Enhancements to the benchmarking tools include the following:

  • A new phase-charting feature graphically displays the duration of each phase of an IC project’s lifecycle, from concept to release to production (see Figure 1).
  • Trend analysis utilities now enable IC organizations to plot moving averages for all key performance indicators, enabling reliable and continuous monitoring of development improvement.
  • Phase charts, x-y scatter charts and histograms can be quickly assembled as a single “report set” and automatically exported to a PowerPoint¹ slide deck.
  • Database queries result in retrieval of higher project counts.

“These enhancements further increase the power of our customers to analyze how they compare to their competitors in the industry, monitor key performance indicators and perform root cause diagnoses of cycle-time bottlenecks,” explained Ron Collett, President of Numetrics Management Systems.

Phase Charting Enhancements

Numetrics has introduced an advanced phase-charting capability for diagnosing cycle time and productivity bottlenecks in the IC project lifecycle (see Figure 1). At the push of a button, a stacked-bar chart displays the amount of time expended during each phase of the lifecycle, with a different color for each phase. Likewise, when a group of projects is selected, averages of each phase in the project set are calculated and displayed. Two project sets can be viewed simultaneously, enabling rapid comparisons. With this phase charting capability, semiconductor organizations can quickly determine which phases are having the greatest impact on project duration and productivity.

Figure 1. With the Numetrics-NMX benchmarking tools, semiconductor organizations can
use phase charts to rapidly determine the time expended during each phase of
the project lifecycle.

Today, users are applying the phase-charting tool to analyze the time consumed during key phases of the project lifecycle such as the specification phase, or the so-called “fuzzy front end,” which continues to plague semiconductor development. Likewise, the tool is being used to analyze other critical phases such as RTL development, verification and physical design, as well as post-tapeout phases, including validation, qualification, and productization.

Building on the phase-charting analysis, if the user selects a set of projects instead of just a single project, the tools can generate a histogram distribution of the time consumed by three key phases in the lifecycle—the specification phase, the design implementation phase and the post-tapeout phase. The histogram shows the full range of time consumed in each phase among all the projects in the set, allowing users to view the full range of durations for each phase.

Semiconductor Application Markets

The NMX IC Industry Database has three new categories available for querying—network switching & signal processing, peripheral controllers, and display/motor/sensor-interface devices. Users now have 14 categories of IC application markets within the NMX IC Industry Database from which to query.

In addition, database queries now yield significantly higher project counts than ever before. That’s because benchmarked IC projects entering the NMX IC Industry Database are tagged with both the primary and secondary application markets they target. As a result, when a user initiates a database query requesting projects serving a particular application market, the query engine finds and retrieves all projects tagged with that market, irrespective of whether the market is primary or secondary.

Plotting Moving Averages

A new set of utilities provides a highly visual way to distinguish trends in data. Among the most important are moving averages, which can be plotted on x-y scatter charts. In addition to moving averages, these utilities provide a range of capabilities, including plotting trend lines and curves, automatically eliminating outlier data points, and allowing users to set minimum/maximum values to display ranges.

Report Sets

Report Sets is a new capability that simplifies organization of reports and charts within the benchmarking tools. Previously, charts, plots and Diagnostic Summary Reports™, were saved in a single, flat directory. A new Report Set feature allows users to group together any number of x-y scatter plots, histograms, phase charts and Diagnostic Summary Reports into a single, named Report Set for easier organization. Report Sets can also be automatically exported to PowerPoint for presentations. This feature also allows the creation of standard Report Sets, which contain a preferred collection of analysis results that can be retargeted to analyze a different project or Project Set. Retargeting can be applied to all charts in the Report Set in one step.

約ニューメトリクス

Numetrics Management Systems, Inc. provides a unique suite of enterprise software and professional services for integrated circuit (IC) project planning, IC product development benchmarking and IC project lifecycle management (NMX). In use by leading semiconductor firms, the software leverages Numetrics’ patented IC design complexity calculation engine and proprietary mathematical models, which are calibrated with statistical data extracted from over 1,100 benchmarked chip projects from more than 30 major semiconductor companies. The Numetrics-NMX™ solution enables superior project schedule estimation and risk analysis, resource planning, execution pipeline analysis and benchmarking against industry norms. The company is headquartered at 20863 Stevens Creek Boulevard, Suite 510, Cupertino, CA 95014. Phone: (408) 351-5800. Fax: (408) 351-5850. E-mail: info@numetrics.com. Web site: www.numetrics.com.