Wireless Solutions

(Voice & Data, Broadcast & Satellite, Antenna Interface/RF Components)

 

Wireless and wired communications, computing, and consumer electronics continue to drive growth in the semiconductor market. Growth in wireless communications has been driven primarily by the development of new communications technologies and the availability of improved services at lower costs over high-speed, highly reliable networks. Demand for greater functionality in mobile, handheld devices such as smartphones, portable media devices, and personal navigation devices has increased.

Wireless development teams are grappling with the competing demands of expanded feature sets, lower cost, lower power consumption, growing competition, and increasing integration of digital, analog and RF circuitry on a single die. To grow and sustain new market opportunities, semiconductor and systems companies have to:

  • Devote more resources to embedded SW development
  • Accurately plan dependencies between H/W and S/W developments
  • Manage an increasing number of active and diverse products in their development pipeline.

New-product development success demands the ability to organize R&D efforts to enable new levels of performance and address areas such as energy efficiency while providing additional features.

Features and Benefits

Numetrics’ enterprise resource planning software (NMX-ERP) enables design managers and project leaders to tackle and conquer these product-development challenges for wireless communications product development. Project scheduling with NMX-ERP provides a consistent methodology for IP, IC, and software that enables better planning, realistic resource estimation, and improved schedule predictability.

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 wireless sub-segment such as voice & data. Project leaders also can benchmark the execution assumptions of their project plan with NMX IC Schedule Risk Analyzer™.

For example: The design manager of a digital baseband chip for cell phone applications can accurately describe the new product in a variety of process technologies and variants, while parameters for low-power (power modes, power domains, voltage-frequency pairs) are collected. The capability also exists to define the feature set as implemented with a wide array of logic functions (encoder/decoder, channel processors, framers, etc.), and memory functions (ROM, SRAM, Flash, EEPROM, etc.), while a variety of analog choices (amplifiers, filters, charge pumps, PLLs, etc.) can be entered along with their key design parameters.

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 wireless-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 software projects while inter-project dependencies can be identified and evaluated using Program Viewer. Each tool provides further insight into development schedule risk providing the user with improved schedule predictability.

Whether it’s a Bluetooth design or a challenging embedded software implementation developed in parallel with an advanced baseband processor, Numetrics NMX-ERP provides the latest information in wired communications IC, IP, and embedded software 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

Contact us: info@numetrics.com