Professional Services and Support

Numetrics’ professional services organization helps customers apply our software and deliver the results, quickly and efficiently. This type of engagement helps customers to study and analyze the methodology, tools and overall solution in the context of one or more of their own projects. Customers find it an effective way to rapidly extract value and, at the same time, understand how the solution fits into their business processes. Following this full service engagement, the customer becomes self-sufficient, although in some cases customers prefer to utilize some modest amount of professional services on a continuing basis.

Core competencies of the professional services organization include:

IC project planning and schedule risk assessment
Multi-project pipeline analysis and optimization
Benchmarking of development capability
Providing root cause analysis of productivity and cycle time bottlenecks

Numetrics Tools and Expertise Graphic

Professionals staffing this organization each bring 15 to 25 years of experience in IC and embedded software systems development and have been directly involved in developing and managing IC projects at leading semiconductor and electronics systems companies. Collectively, the group has helped develop hundreds of IC and system projects comprising both hardware and software. Numetrics assists its customers in the following areas by leveraging best practices, its IC Industry Database and NMX-ERP suite of production-proven tools:

IC Project Planning & Schedule Risk Assessment

Estimating design complexity
Estimating resource (staffing) requirements
Estimating development cycle-time
Measuring schedule risk
Performing “what-if” project plan simulation (exploring tradeoff: chip staffing level vs. development cycle-time vs. chip functionality & performance)
Quantifying probability and magnitude of schedule slip, given complexity of the design and resources allocated.

Pipeline Analysis & Optimization

Identifying resource conflicts across multiple projects
Identifying which roles are oversubscribed and at what point in time
Alternative plans to eliminate resource conflicts, including re-sequencing projects and re-scoping projects
Developing 3–5 year resource estimate requirements for product roadmaps

Benchmarking IC Development Capability:

Benchmarking of a full range of metrics, including:
- Productivity
- Throughput
- Development cycle-time
- Spin count
- Schedule slip
- Time-to-1st-tapeout
- Spec development time
- Time & effort from spec to initial net-list & final net-list
- Time & effort to customer sample
- Time & effort from tapeout to production release

Root Cause Analysis and Data Mining

IC Product Development
- Productivity analysis
- Development cycle time analysis

Casual Factor Analysis
- EDA tools and flows
- IP & library quality
- Variations among development sites
- Staffing strategies
- Spec development process
- Design complexity
- Embedded software
- Management practices

Support

Numetrics takes a unique approach to training customers on its NMX-ERP™ software and databases. Instead of providing abstract examples, Numetrics applies the customer’s own integrated circuit (IC) design projects as the training vehicles for teaching users how to operate the software. Customers depart from training sessions with real work accomplished.

Typical length of a training session is one hour to 90 minutes. Numetrics personnel assist the customer in entering the necessary data to generate the project plan, or an assessment of design complexity or a performance benchmark of a project. Numetrics takes a similar approach to customer support–plenty of hands-on assistance. The goal is to work directly with customers on their projects and data to achieve the desired objective. The Numetrics training and support organization conducts its work at the customer’s site, as well as through email, phone and remotely using desktop sharing software, which is real time and highly interactive.