By Ron Collett

The latest venture capital investment figures are out from PricewaterhouseCoopers’ MoneyTree and the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). They’re not pretty.

VCs spent just $17.7 billion on 2,795 deals last year. That’s down 36 percent from $27.9 billion in 2008, and it represents the lowest dollar amount and number of investments since 1997.

The chart I pulled together above, based on that data, shows the quarterly VC investment trends for semiconductor companies in just the past three years. Not an encouraging trend line. Total VC investment last year in our industry was $771 million, compared with a peak of $3.4 billion in 2000. What a difference a decade makes.

This realignment of dollars has brought about new expectations from investors and from semiconductor vendors.

Speaking to The Wall Street Journal last week, Bob Ackerman, a venture capitalist at Allegis Capital in Palo Alto, said:

We’re preoccupied by capital efficiency.

Those two words, “capital efficiency,” speak directly to the semiconductor industry’s challenge. This focus on capital efficiency is why semiconductor vendors should be increasingly preoccupied with boosting engineering productivity to get the most from their R&D budget. Lacking an internal fab for differentiation in the fabless era, companies are looking for new ways to gain competitive advantage, and they’re training their sights on their R&D organizations.

The industry’s best-in-class semiconductor IDMs in fact have jumped on this imperative, especially as many of them have shed the last of their owned fabs and now need to compete with fabless companies.

But it works the other way too: Long-time fabless players suddenly find big new competitors that have shed their fabs. They too are looking to boost product-development productivity to stay one step ahead of their new competition.

It’s clear the days of big-time investment are a thing of the past. Today, good companies are those with innovative product ideas; great companies are those that also drive highly productive R&D organizations to get those products completed on predictable schedules and to market ahead of the competition to realize higher returns.

(Summary: A clever YouTube video highlights how communications disconnects can prompt IC product-development projects to slip schedule).

By Ron Collett

We talk a lot about schedule predictability and maximizing IC design throughput. That’s what we do as part of our goal to help product-development teams improve productivity and ROI. But there’s another, more subtle goal, and that’s improving engineering communications and expectations.

Engineers will work most productively when given an aggressive schedule if they know it to be realistic because it’s rooted in fact-based planning. With unrealistic schedule assumptions, the reaction is “been there, done that,” and productivity—and ultimately morale—suffers.

This dynamic is vibrantly illustrated in a YouTube video inspired and narrated by Jasper Design Automation CEO Kathryn Kranen, called How Engineers Communicate: A Video Parody.

In it, the mythical company WonderChips is planning its T-1000 communications device. The video takes us through the planning process, the assumptions and most importantly the communications disconnects engineers and executives encounter along the way.

To summarize the story line:

• In the beginning, Rakesh determines that the T-1000 device is four times more complex than its predecessor and therefore a new EDA tool is needed to speed this project to completion on schedule. His boss, however, rejects the investment.

• Next, the T-1000 team grabs a conference room to begin its bottom-up planning approach, fueled by chips and soda and catered food. Hours go by, punctuated by arguments over how long certain blocks will take to design.

• Eventually, the team leader seems satisfied. She tells the group, “Assuming all these assumptions hold, I think the schedule looks really good.” The team agrees, and the leader goes off to present the schedule to executive management.

• Later, she returns to the team with good news and bad news: The good news is the executive staff loves the feature set. Bad news is the T-800, another project, is slipping schedule, and there’s competitive pressure in the market. So the executives want the T-1000 to sample months sooner than the team’s bottom-up plan called for. Oh, and they need to beef up the memory subsystem while they’re at it.

Says the team leader: “I know as a team we can do this. You guys with me?”

The team groans. As the engineers exit the conference room, shaking their heads in disbelief, one engineer murmurs: “It will be done when it is done.”

The T-1000 ends up slipping by at more than six months, and the executive who turned down the tool investment demands tape out at any cost.

From my perspective, WonderChips would have benefited by complementing its bottom-up scheduling approach with a top-down methodology—using quantified estimates of the chip’s complexity, the team’s productivity and a model of the rate at which effort will be expended on the project.

It would have helped engineers and management communicate in a common language and build an aggressive yet achievable schedule. And it would saved WonderChips’ management from having to extend the on-site day care closing time to midnight to get the chip done.

By Ron Collett

I had the pleasure of participating in a great online panel yesterday that was part of the EE Times SOC Virtual Conference, attended live by more than 1,500 people. CTO Grant Martin with Tensilica, product-development Vice President Steve Douglass with Xilinx and ASIC and FPGA designer Sven Andersson of Realtime Embedded AB all contributed to robust discussion of where next-generation design is headed.

I encourage you to listen to panel, which is now archived for the next six months.

My point was pretty straight forward:

• If you misunderstand your semiconductor design project’s true cost, your SOC may be doomed.

Think about it: An SOC design today needs to return 10x its investment. There aren’t a lot of huge end markets that justify SOC projects where the costs and schedule aren’t carefully managed. If the design costs $50 million to $80 million to develop, and there’s only a $200 million market, then the design can’t be justified.

So getting your arms around true development cost is what SOC development is all about.

Getting back into any market after a few years’ absence is a challenge, especially when it’s the hyper-competitive, high-volume, low-margin consumer market. But Infineon, which had years of experience selling Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) chipsets into that space saw opportunity to re-assert itself in the global market.

But how does a semiconductor design team approach the challenge when its size is limited by a fixed budget and the delivery date was set in stone? Infineon engaged with Numetrics to tackle the design challenge, and it ended up achieving 20 percent higher productivity than other projects. Read this case study to learn how Numetrics’ software and methodology helped Infineon gets its DECT project to market.

The case study is among several you can find here on the Numetrics site.

Does the Infineon experience resonate with you?