NVM Insider Issue #2
| Index |
|---|
| The NVM Insider, Issue 2 |
| Page 2 - Executive Opinion |
| Page 3 - Outside Thoughts |
| Page 4 - NVM on the Mind |
| All Pages |
Executive Opinion: Ramping Up On Hard IP Product Lines
Rhéal Gervais, Vice President of Operations, Sidense
The challenges of running the Operations Group at a hard IP vendor company such as Sidense may not be so obvious to the outside world. If we simply spend a few minutes focused on product definitions, you’ll get a flavor for what I mean.
The product line of a hard IP vendor can be viewed in terms of a simple mathematical equation, as follows:
where
- num_products = total number of individual products we have available for our customers
- product family = a particular product design (i.e., SiPROM OTP memory)
- configurations = number of possible configurations possible of each product family
- foundries = silicon foundries where the products are designed into
- nodes = process technology nodes that have been designed into (i.e., 180nm, 130nm, etc.)
- processes = actual silicon process variants where each product family is designed into for each node and for each foundry
If one simply assumes that each variable has a value of 5, for example, this comes out to 3125 individual products. And every time an additional process or product family is added to the mix, potentially hundreds of products could be added to the product catalog at one time.
To add more complexity, each one of these products has a set of views (i.e., Verilog, datasheet, GDSII, etc.). If we assume a total of 10 views per product, that’s over 30,000 individual files.
And that is only considering the product line definition. On top of that, we need to have all of these files under strict revision control, allow for controlled changes along the way, keep track of which products were sent to which customers, make all of this information available to our sales and support staff in real time, deal with changes to process files coming in from the foundries on a daily basis, and so on.
If one simply tries to remember which products were purchased by which customer, the best of us would get lost very quickly. The data management and business process challenges are non-trivial. As Sidense continues to develop new product lines, work on new processes, work with new foundries, and design into new nodes, and as our customer base continues to grow and our sales volume increases, our challenge is to make all of this happen as smoothly as possible and to smile through it all.