Semiconductor companies are now offering design solutions rather than single products. Similar to financial institutions that categorised their offerings into sets of assets (for example, investment banking with financial planning) to create solutions, semiconductor companies are packaging sets of designs. Thus, the ability to offer semiconductor design solutions is being governed through asset management of engineering IP. Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) as it is defined today, both within and among enterprises, is a growing focus in the industry. Giga Information Group projects 20 percent growth in global PLM sales in 2003 to US$1.4 billion (excluding CAD/CAM sales).1 A recent CIMdata survey of 180 companies found that 84 percent were planning new design collaboration projects in the next 12 months and that 70 percent were planning to maintain or increase funding in this area.2 When evaluating the survey base, we focused on critical success factors linked to revenue growth and market share, including time to market, time to volume, process adherence and feature richness. We correlated a set of drivers to each success factor. The results revealed interesting trends and gaps. In general, companies are mastering time-to-market concepts and thus are more comfortable outsourcing elements of their NPI cycles. Also, for those focused on IP categorisation, we noted new licensing revenues associated with the repackaging of older designs, enhanced IP reuse, a stronger portfolio and simplified outsourcing decisions. However, in meeting time-to-market projections, many still experience pitfalls, such as: - Failure to address design-manufacturing collaboration, undermining good time-to-market results with poor time-to-value results
- Sacrifice of portfolio-management discipline, leading to either eliminating products late in their development cycles or releasing products that don't sell, and again yielding poor time-to-value results.
In the analysis, we correlated success factors and drivers to further detail industry needs and PLM activities associated with enhanced industry performance. The following areas were analysed: - Portfolio management -- including product selection, core product technology, and use of knowledge and IP
- Process quality -- including cost, speed, flexibility, internal and external collaboration, and capacity planning and supply chain optimisation
- Toolset integration -- including clarity of customer requirements.
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