Let’s face it: The stakes in starting a new complex IC design or embedded software project never have been higher. Development costs can soar into the millions of dollars, market windows are narrowing, and the project can consume the time of engineers and programmers for 18 months or more. Misjudge the schedule or staffing plan, and you risk missing market opportunities, tying up valuable resources and going over budget. Today, there is virtually no room for error.

How confident are you in your project plan? Is it based based on facts and data? How sure are you that the project is staffed adequately to implement the target feature set in the required development time? Today, 89% of all IC projects miss their target schedule, with an average over-run of 44%.

What if you could…

• Quickly generate a reliable schedule and staffing estimate for your project plan based on a quantitative assessment of your chip’s design complexity?
• Quantitatively analyze and validate your project schedule, staffing levels and other key assumptions in your plan, all with confidence?
• Instantaneously access an Industry Database of more than 1,600 benchmarked design projects, which allows you to compare your plan’s complexity to industry norms?
• Normalize the complexity of your past designs to predict more accurately the staffing and schedule of your next project?
• Get an early-warning of schedule slip using production-proven tools and methods, to help avert scheduling disasters or over commitments before they happen?

Numetrics gives you the capability to do all that. Based on sophisticated algorithms and statistical models calibrated with the most comprehensive database in the industry, Numetrics’ NMX-ERP™ software is a valuable asset to any semiconductor organization.

Numetrics equips engineering and program managers with fact-based tools 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 NMX-ERP software tools model the development cycle as a stochastic, or random, process.

From there, the tools perform three fundamental tasks:

1. Expose inherent risk in schedule and staffing assumptions by benchmarking your project plan against a database of completed projects whose complexity has been normalized for accurate comparison to your particular design.
2. Allow you to do “fact-based” planning, which complements intuition based on prior project experiences
3. 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.

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

Numetrics offers solutions for:

1. Developing highly reliable IC development schedules
2. Accurately measuring IC development schedule risk
3. Identifying engineering resource shortfalls in the project execution pipeline
4. Benchmarking and calibrating IC development capabilities
5. Root cause analysis and data mining of development cycle bottlenecks

You can click on the links on the left of this page to read more about each one of our solutions in more detail.