Wired Communications Design Solutions

(Networking, Telecom, Line Interface)

The proliferation of the Internet, including user demand for premium content and rich media, drives the need for greater performance in wired communications. To remain competitive, semiconductor companies must deliver increasingly competitive solutions that are scalable, highly reliable, and able to satisfy the insatiable bandwidth demands of ever-growing video, voice and data applications.

Global competition from low-cost economies, coupled with a race for new, faster, more reliable solutions demand a delicate four-way balancing act between:

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 wired 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 computing sub-segment such as networking. 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 high-end network processor or an advanced switch fabric and interconnect chip can accurately describe units with a wide array of logic, processor and memory functions as well as quantify the specification, verification, and circuit reuse of those units. This capability of defining reuse allows the design manager to make tradeoffs between the purchase of IP and the reduction of features required to meet the product development window. Reuse bins, a unique feature of NMX-ERP, inspires internal debate over the challenges confronting a design team which leads to a robust assessment of risk.

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 computing-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 an Ethernet IC design or a challenging embedded software implementation developed in parallel with an advanced network 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

• Whitepaper: Measuring IC Development Productivity

• Case studies: Innovasic Maximizes Design Throughput by Benchmarking Microcontroller Development Team Productivity

Contact us: info@numetrics.com