Implementing a Design Management System

By Bob Smith, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Business Development at Uniquify

I recently had lunch with a dejected engineer from a semiconductor startup in big trouble. After months of effort at no small expense, the chip design project was an utter failure, though not a result of the chip’s poor power, performance or area numbers. It was worse than that –– almost everything went wrong, from resource management, schedule slips and budget to feature creep and mismatched expectations.
Designing a complex system on chip (SoC) for a small process technology –– an almost mandatory requirement these days –– takes some planning, something this startup’s R&D management evidently didn’t consider. If only the managers had devised a process-oriented method with measureable results the project most likely would have proceeded as planned and without failure.

Chip design project challenges are numerous and rarely follow an orthogonal route. A professional design services company, such as Uniquify, lives and dies by consistently delivering completed projects on time and within budget. To do so, it developed an internal design management system that manages every project, ensuring they remain on track and achieve their goals. It is a vital resource for designers and managers, and based on years of project experience.

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