IC Project Planning and Schedule Risk Analysis Services

Numetrics provides engineering and program managers with services that deliver an accurate and quantitative perspective on the schedule and staffing decisions they are about to make. Starting with an estimate of the design’s complexity, the professional services organization leverages the NMX-ERP tools and perform three fundamental tasks:

• Expose inherent risk in schedule and staffing assumptions by benchmarking your project plan’s assumptions against a database of completed projects whose complexity has been normalized for accurate comparison to your particular design.
• Allow you to do “fact-based” planning, which complements intuition that’s based on prior project experiences.
• Perform “what if” project plan simulation, enabling managers to generate a range of different scenarios based on alternative IC product feature sets, staffing constraints and schedule targets.

Equipped with both an industry database of more than 1,700 IC projects compiled from over 100 semiconductor companies and a suite of planning and risk analysis tools that have been run on more than 1,000 production IC designs in the semiconductor industry, Numetrics’ professional services consultants are experts in assisting with the creation of achievable–yet aggressive–resource plans and schedules. Numetrics’ consultants are also able to accurately measure IC project schedule risk by benchmarking a project plan’s underlying assumptions.

Services consultants provide managers with a robust, quantitative analysis of the complexity, or design difficulty, for each IC design project they’re about to undertake. The analysis not only quantifies design challenge, but also enables the professional services team to suggest ways to reduce complexity without compromising the design’s functional capabilities. Reduced design complexity translates directly into shorter cycle time or reduced project staffing requirements (or both).

Professional service consultants work with the customer’s development team to gather the primary factors contributing to the chip’s design complexity–circuit composition, process technology, transistor count, clocking, timing, power consumption, etc. Using the Numetrics software, service consultants rapidly calculate and calibrate the design complexity of ICs, as well as IP modules. The engagement typically occurs during the concept and planning stages of a new project or during project execution to assess the impact of a proposed spec change.

Professional services enables engineering managers to rapidly explore alternative project plan scenarios in a “what-if” simulation environment that supports tradeoffs between schedule, staffing, chip functionality and performance. This is the only solution of its kind in the world.

The Bottom Line: Numetrics’ professional services enable semiconductor organizations to achieve unprecedented schedule predictability, which means minimal, if any, schedule slip, and at the same time, managers tap into the Industry Database to ensure that schedule targets are highly competitive. Projects finish on-time, within budget and boast competitive cycle times.