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New Capabilities Give Semiconductor Companies Unprecedented Power to Diagnose IC Productivity Bottlenecks

Cupertino, Calif., 2007 January 31

Numetrics Management Systems, Inc., the leading provider of software for diagnosing productivity bottlenecks in the IC development lifecycle, announced major enhancements to its flagship data mining tool, NMX Data Miner™. With this latest release, engineering groups can now diagnose any bottleneck suspected of impacting development effectiveness. The new capabilities enable semiconductor organizations to examine any suspected bottleneck and quickly determine its quantitative impact on product development.

Examples of bottlenecks, or causal factors, include the EDA tools and libraries the design team uses, specification stability, engineering skills, differences among design sites, IP quality, and overall management. Users analyze causal factors by creating a custom template and inserting it into one of Numetrics’ project lifecycle management (NMX) tools. The custom template provides a repository for the causal factor data, such as the name and version of the particular EDA tool suspected of causing problems in the design flow. Once project teams capture the data on a handful of IC projects, NMX Data Miner reveals whether relationships exist between the suspected causal factor and the particular performance metric of interest, including productivity, project duration, time-to-tapeout, development throughput, development cost and spin count.

The column chart below illustrates an example of NMX Data Miner’s diagnostic capabilities. It shows the results of analyzing 34 projects from a particular IC product development group. Upon the completion of each project, the project manager characterized the stability of the chip’s design specification (as either Below Average, Average or Above Average).

NMX Data Miner then grouped the projects into their respective bins and plotted the average project duration for each bin. The results show a clear relationship between spec stability, which is the independent variable, and project duration, which is the dependent variable. The next step in the root cause analysis would be to examine the impact of spec stability on a range of other performance metrics including, productivity, spin count, throughput, development cost, etc.

“NMX Data Miner’s new capabilities provide organizations with a powerful vehicle for defining which factors they suspect are causing efficiency problems and rapidly verifying their hypotheses,” said Steve Gary, vice president of product marketing and professional services at Numetrics. “It’s the first true data mining tool available to IC development organizations that require production-proven software for quantitatively diagnosing bottlenecks and improving their development capability,” he added.

NMX Data Miner provides a robust database for storing the development organization’s project data and performance metrics. Data and metrics for each IC project can be captured throughout the project lifecycle, and results are instantaneously accessible to any individual granted the appropriate data access privileges. A full range of statistical analysis tools together with a suite of graphical and tabular reporting tools enable rapid data mining and root cause diagnosis of all project data.

NMX Data Miner is an add-on product to the Numetrics’ NMX IC Industry Database™, which comprises performance metrics on more than 1,000 IC projects released to volume production by over 30 major semiconductor and electronics companies.

約ニューメトリクス

Numetrics Management Systems, Inc. provides enterprise software and services for project lifecycle management (NMX) to electronics companies throughout the world. In use in leading semiconductor and systems manufacturers, its solutions incorporate proprietary, advanced technologies tailored to integrated circuit (IC) development that dramatically improve the accuracy and reliability of project schedules and staffing forecasts and provide industry benchmarking and root cause diagnosis of bottlenecks in the IC development process. 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

Acronyms

  • IC: Integrated Circuit
  • EDA: Electronic Design Automation
  • IP: Intellectual Property (functional circuit blocks commonly referred to as “IP”)

    • NMX IC Industry Database™ is a trademark of Numetrics Management Systems, Inc.
    NMX Data Miner™ is a trademark of Numetrics Management Systems, Inc.