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IC Development Pipeline Resource Analysis

Cupertino, Calif., 2007 April 9

Numetrics Management Systems, Inc., the leading provider of fact-based project planning tools to the semiconductor industry, today announced the launch of NMX Pipeliner™, a multi-project, fact-based pipelining software tool specifically tailored to integrated circuit (IC) development. NMX Pipeliner reveals whether total resource demand from projects in the execution pipeline exceeds availability during the target time horizon. Because it uses a fact-based approach, NMX Pipeliner alerts managers in the early stages of project planning as to whether enough staffing of each role is available to finish all projects on schedule.

“What differentiates NMX Pipeliner from other pipeline analysis tools is its integration with NMX Project Planner™. The combination makes it a true fact-based pipelining solution,” said Steve Gary, Numetrics’ vice president of product marketing and professional services. “Well before detailed bottom-up plans are available, users can analyze projected headcount consumption and identify shortfalls. The Planner-Pipeliner combination enables early detection, which is critical for taking timely action to resolve resource shortfalls.”

NMX Project Planner, a companion to NMX Pipeliner, automatically generates monthly staffing requirements for individual IC projects by assessing each chip’s design complexity. Semiconductor companies throughout the industry use NMX Project Planner to estimate project staffing requirements, and with NMX Pipeliner, they now have unprecedented capability to instantaneously analyze the pipeline.

Using complexity as the basis for estimating staffing is what makes it a fact-based solution. Project staffing estimates from NMX Planner flow directly into NMX Pipeliner, giving users a complete view of the execution pipeline from the moment the design manager provides a rough description of the new chip’s specs. Fact-based estimates guide creation of bottom-up plans. Once bottom-up plans¹ are available, they replace the corresponding top-down estimates previously fed to NMX Pipeliner. Allowing mixing of top-down and bottom-up plans enables NMX Pipeliner to provide managers with the most up-to-date and accurate estimate of total headcount consumption.

With NMX Pipeliner, managers get a reliable estimate of not only the pipeline’s total headcount requirements, but also whether projected staffing consumption exceeds availability of each role (i.e. logic designers, verification engineers, etc.). It also analyzes staffing among workgroups and different geographic development sites. The combination enables managers to forecast peak staffing demands and identify resource conflicts among projects, workgroups, sites and individual roles.

Developing resource forecasts associated with long-range IC product development roadmaps is another application of NMX Pipeliner. Business lines creating roadmaps for 3- to 5-year time horizons typically have great difficulty generating reliable estimates of the engineering resources needed to implement these roadmaps. Moreover, identifying major gaps between the roadmap and the resources needed to implement it is a critical aspect of the roadmap development process. The combination of NMX Project Planner and Pipeliner provides a rapid and reliable solution to this challenge.

With NMX Pipeliner, not only can managers quickly spot oversubscription of critical resources, they can also prioritize project execution sequence and observe the impact on resource consumption. Once the manager defines the execution prioritization, NMX Pipeliner can automatically sequence project execution accordingly. It shifts each project’s start date to the earliest point in time in which headcount oversubscriptions are eliminated. This multi-project, resource-leveling capability enables users to ensure that peak resource consumption within a given period does not exceed staffing availability of key roles.

Figures 1, 2, and 3 (below) illustrate three views from NMX Pipeliner that managers overseeing multiple projects use to determine whether available staffing meets projected demand. First they generate staffing estimates for each project using NMX Project Planner. Next the estimates are seamlessly imported into NMX Pipeliner (Figure 1). NMX Pipeliner then graphically displays the total headcount that all projects consume (Figure 2), as well as the utilization of each particular role (Figure 3). Most importantly, this process occurs far in advance of the availability of detailed bottom-up project plans, yet provides reliable, early estimates of the total staffing needed for an IC business line’s project portfolio.

Figure 1. Graphical view of the staffing (profiles) generated by NMX Project Planner (i.e., the resource demand of each project). FTE = Full Time Equivalent Person.

Figure 2. NMX Pipeliner sums of the demand of all projects in the execution pipeline (shown in Figure 1) and simultaneously displays the total available staffing (horizontal line). In this example, demand exceeds availability starting in 2008 and continuing until 2009.

Figure 3. NMX Pipeliner generates a table displaying total utilization of each role for all projects in the execution pipeline (Figures 1 & 2) above on monthly basis.

“Organizations often find themselves with multiple IC projects in various stages of development and no means for quickly determining whether they have sufficient numbers of particular roles to meet overlapping time-to-market demands of several projects,” added Steve Gary. “NMX Pipeliner assesses the collective staffing demand and utilization for any number of projects and automatically eliminates any oversubscription violations by adjusting execution sequence according to the time-to-market priorities set by the manager.”

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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

¹ A bottom-up plan is one typically created using a spreadsheet or generic project planning tool such as Microsoft Project.©

Note: Microsoft Project is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.