Industrial Design Solutions

(Embedded Control, Security/Identification & e-Currency, Power Devices)

The electronic content of the industrial applications segment is growing at a faster rate than the industry as a whole. Electronics based on semiconductor products and embedded software are a major source of differentiation, and growth is being driven by demand for energy efficiency and productivity gains. Industrial applications commonly involve signal acquisition, conditioning, and processing, providing opportunities for semiconductor products like analog ICs, digital signal processors, and microcontrollers.

Watch a video:

thomas wille screen capture

Thomas Wille, Sr. Dir., Innovation and Technology, NXP, on tackling schedule predictability

Teams designing for industrial applications face many pressures while developing to tight schedules. Typical semiconductor product life cycles can be as short as two years, yet the product life of industrial goods can be greater than 10 years. In addition to long planning cycles, teams must design systems that provide significant reliability yet meet consumer electronics price points. Not only are the applications diverse, the supply chain is complicated. To be successful, semiconductor companies must show value to both the low-cost commodity power-supply manufacturers as well as the OEM system manufacturers that value full-featured performance in both hardware and software. Maximizing semiconductor opportunities in the industrial arena is a challenging task.

Features and Benefits

Numetrics’ enterprise resource planning software (NMX-ERP) helps design managers and project leaders tackle and conquer these product-development challenges for both embedded software and IC hardware—including the analog-mixed signal (AMS) functions that are vital to industrial electronics.

NMX-ERP takes into consideration hundreds of design parameters along with unit information to quantify the IC product’s complexity. Using the NMX IC Industry Database™, project leaders can compare their IC project to similar projects within the industrial segment or benchmark the execution assumptions of their project plan with NMX IC Schedule Risk Analyzer™.

For example: The design manager of a microcontroller for e-metering can accurately describe the IC in a variety of process technologies and variants, as well as define parameters for low-power (power modes, power domains, voltage-frequency pairs). On the analog portion of the IC, the design manager can choose from more than 60 AMS functions, including DC/DC regulators (linear, switching), power devices (gate drivers), and analog-to-digital converters.

Another example: The design manager of a home appliance or lighting device can choose among more than 60 AMS functions to accurately quantify the complexity of their developments: high/low side drivers and switches, amplifiers and band gap regulators, each with its own set of parameters. For each AMS block, function specific parameters are collected as well as the transistor type percentage (MOS, Bipolar, DMOS).

Project leaders then use NMX IC Project Planner™ to perform quick and reliable ‘what-if’ analysis of the project dimensions—complexity, duration, staffing—as they strive to meet the schedule and resource demands of the industrial-sector. Analysis of the entire development program (hardware and software) can be achieved with NMX Software Project Planner™ and NMX Program Viewer. Similar ‘what-if’ analysis can be performed on embedded software projects while inter-project dependencies can be identified and evaluated using Program Viewer. Each tool provides further insight into development schedule risk and improves predictability.

Whether it’s an analog-intensive IC design or a challenging real-time software implementation to manage multiple safety sensors on a subsystem, Numetrics NMX-ERP provides the latest information in industrial electronics IC and embedded software design to enable project leaders to:

  • Measure development productivity;
  • Improve the predictability of development schedules;
  • Quantify development schedule risk;
  • Benchmark against the industry’s best-in-class.

Resources

  • Case studies:

International Rectifier Baselines Teams’ Productivity

Innovasic Maximizes Design Throughput by Benchmarking Microcontroller Development Team Productivity

Security IC Group at NXP Reduces Cycle Time While Raising Confidence

Contact us: info@numetrics.com