Competition among semiconductor companies has become super-heated, and R&D excellence has never been more important to establishing competitive advantage. But how do you know if an organization’s performance is best-in-class, especially that of a competitor? Such accolades are often anecdotal and based heavily on perception, a few unsubstantiated metrics or the halo created by the company’s strong financials. High revenue masks much and distorts even more. [More]

What’s the optimal team size for a given IC design project? It’s a question I hear often from engineering managers and senior executives. What they’re actually asking is whether they’re over-staffing projects and therefore wasting resources. Implicitly, they’re also asking “what’s the fewest number of engineers I can put on a given project and still finish on time?” They’re important questions directly impacting R&D ROI. [More]

Bad news: Steadily declining IC development productivity means more job losses for engineers employed in first-world economies—e.g. U.S. and Europe. Those lost jobs are going to second-world economies because labor costs are much lower. Moreover, the trend is accelerating as chip design complexity outpaces gains in productivity. Don’t shoot the messenger for the message. [More]