NMX IC Industry Database™

The NMX IC Industry Database™ is composed of more than 1,600 benchmarked IC projects compiled from over 75 semiconductor companies and covers 22 application market segments, including wireless and wired communications, computing and peripherals, entertainment, industrial, and transportation. Design styles include SoC, RF and analog, mixed-signal, ASIC, ASSP, and advanced processors.

The large number of categories allows engineering managers to calibrate project plans and benchmark IC development capability.

Numetrics’ Industry Database is the only database of its kind in the world and was compiled in connection with the company’s benchmarking consulting practice. The Database and consulting practice continue to offer semiconductor organizations a fast and reliable vehicle for determining how their chip development performance compares to the industry.

Having access to a large sample of industry projects in a particular subcategory provides a powerful aid for IC project planning and schedule risk analysis. For example, after normalizing for complexity differences, which Numetrics’ patented complexity calculation engine performs automatically, users can calibrate project plans against industry norms to validate schedule and staffing assumptions. Likewise, when using Numetrics’ schedule and resource estimation tools to plan new projects, users can quickly extract similar projects from the Database to establish a statistically valid baseline for guiding the estimation engines.

Project Search Engine Finds Projects Fast

The IC Industry Database includes a search engine that automatically finds projects in the Database that match a set of criteria the user specifies. To find the desired projects, the user:

• First applies a set of filters that specify particular application market, chip characteristics, etc.
• Refines the search by applying the NMX Project Search Engine, which ranks the projects in the extracted project set according to how similar they are to the user-defined criteria.
• Either manually specifies the criteria or instructs the engine to automatically extract them from an existing project.
• Specifies the maximum number of projects the search engine should return.

The IC Industry Database’s filtering utilities and search engine makes the task of finding comparable projects fast and easy, providing a powerful aid in calibrating project plans and statistically quantifying schedule risk.

A large number of end-equipment categories in the IC Industry Database enable managers to get precise comparisons for calibrating both project plans and benchmarking completed projects.

When users apply the search engine to only their own portfolio of projects, a report is automatically generated that lists each project, ordered from least similar to most similar. The results are available in Numetrics’ data mining tool, NMX Data Miner™, which engineering groups use to diagnose causes of low productivity and other chip development bottlenecks.

The NMX Project Search Engine searches Numetrics’ Industry Database and identifies those projects whose characteristics most closely match the profile the user specifies. The search engine allows managers to quickly identify projects that can serve as references for calibrating new project plans and benchmarking completed projects.