Over the years, we've seen a wide range of advances in semiconductor design services. The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced that the global semiconductor industry recorded sales of US$ 468.8 billion in 2018 – the highest annual total for the industry and an increase of 13.7% from 2017 sales.
As the demand for semiconductor services continues to increase and the industry witnesses a wider range of technological innovations, we can clearly see a move towards lower geometries (7nm, 12nm, 16nm, etc.). The main drivers of this trend are the benefits in terms of power, area and various other features that become possible with lower geometries.
The proliferation of lower geometries has boosted business in several areas, especially in the mobility, communication, IoT, cloud, AI for hardware platforms (ASIC, FPGA, boards) sectors.
Delivering a low-tech design project on time is important in today's dynamic and competitive marketplace. However, there are many unknowns in the bottom geometry that impact the scheduled delivery of the project/product. By keeping the elements below in mind, it is possible to ensure on-time delivery on lower geometry nodes.
1. Bottom technology node cost modeling
A chip design lead provides the necessary strong technical leadership and has overall responsibility for the integrated circuit design.
For lower geometry designs, engineers need to define activities from specification to silicon, sequence them in the correct order, estimate required resources, and estimate time required to complete tasks. At the same time, they need to focus on reducing the total system cost while meeting specific service requirements. The following are actions that engineers can take for cost optimization:
use multiple patterns
Use proper design-to-test (DFT) techniques
Leverage mask manufacturing, interconnects, and process control
In different layout methods, because node reduction is no longer cost-effective. For continuous performance improvement along with cost control, some companies are now looking at monolithic 3D ICs instead of a conventional planar implementation, as this can provide 30% of energy savings, 40% of performance increase and reduce the cost by 5- 10% without changing to a new node.
2. Advanced data analytics for smart chip manufacturing
In the chip manufacturing process, a large amount of data is generated on the factory floor. Over the years, the amount of this data has continued to grow exponentially with each new technology node dimension. Engineers played key roles in generating and analyzing data to improve predictive maintenance and yield, improve R&D, increase product efficiency and much more.
Applying advanced analytics in chip manufacturing can help improve the quality or performance of individual components, reduce quality assurance testing time, increase throughput, increase equipment availability, and reduce operating costs.
3. Efficient Supply Chain Management
As new technology is often released faster than the R&D schedule, everyone in the chip manufacturing industry is facing an IC supply chain management problem. The big question is: how to improve efficiency and profitability in this scenario.
The answer is faster decision-making and efficient integration of multiple suppliers, customer requirements, distribution centers, warehouses and stores so that merchandise is produced with end-to-end visibility of the supply chain and distributed in the right quantities, at the right time to the right location to minimize total system cost.
4. Process for punctual delivery
Improved customer delivery is an essential part of semiconductor design services. It includes setting up order capture to work with orders at runtime, optimizing cloud computing, logistics and transferring the final product to a customer – keeping them up to date with all the information they need at every step. Planning the complete flow ensures that no critical project deadlines are missed.
To overcome delays, semiconductor design firms can:
- Minimize the use of custom streams and switch to location and route streams for better physical data path capabilities.
- Define and meet a quick response time to customer requirements and change requests.
- Get real-time information from specification to silicon availability in terms of flow, location, reserve and quantity of the semiconductor project.
- Ensure collaborative communication between teams working on the project.
- Focus on criticality analysis – reducing the risk of functional design failures to avoid business impediments.
- Get experience using various tools to manage the project.
- Adopt better technologies (TSMC, GF, UMC, Samsung), better methodology (low power consumption and high speed performance), better tools (Innovus, Synopsys, ICC2, Primetime, ICV).
How is eInfochips positioned to serve the market?
If you want to design innovative products faster, optimize R&D costs, improve time to market, increase operational efficiency or maximize your return on investment (ROI), eInfochips (an Arrow company) is the right design partner .
eInfochips has worked with many of the world's leading companies to contribute to over 500 product designs, with over 40 million deployments worldwide. eInfochips has a large group of engineers specializing in PES services, focusing on in-depth R&D and new product development.
In order to deliver products in short time to market, eInfochips provides ASIC, FPGA and SoC design services based on standard interface protocols. Includes:
- Approval services on front end (RTL design, verification) and back end (physical design and DFT)
- Turnkey design services that cover RTL to GDSII and design layout
- Use of reusable IPs and structure that help the company in short product development time and cost for faster and surer time-to-market
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