25 Do’s and Don’ts for a Successful Custom IC Design Project
Contents
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Overview
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Challenges
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Recommendations for your next IC project
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Benefits of outsourcing
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Learning about Cyient
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Comparing custom IC design experience
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Summary
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25 do’s and don’ts for a successful custom IC design project
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References
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Next steps
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About Cyient
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With the decision to use a custom IC approach for any electronics project, there are many challenges in finding the right engineering resources to meet your schedule and at a cost that fits within the budget.
Overview
Challenges
Probably the single most successful custom IC design example in the world today would be found in consumer electronics, namely the iPhone from Apple with its A-series of processors1. Apple chose to design a processor using a custom IC approach in order to achieve leading-edge integration, speed, cost and power advantages that no other competitor could match using pre-built IP blocks. Samsung is a capable competitor to Apple in the smartphone market, and they also use a custom IC methodology for their Exynos processor chips2. With the decision to use a custom IC approach for any electronics project, there are many challenges in finding the right engineering resources to meet your schedule and at a cost that fits within the budget. Apple and Samsung have the luxury to afford large, custom design teams because of their high product volumes, but most companies in the electronics industry doing custom design are more modest in size.
So how do you assemble a team of custom IC designers for your new project? One approach is to hire new college graduates and then train them in your design methodology. This approach may be cost-effective in the long term, yet it will require time to get them up to speed and become productive. Training also means that your senior engineers are tied up while tutoring and managing the new hires, leading to lower productivity levels.
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You could go out and hire an experienced custom IC designer in the open marketplace that does get you the needed skills, although at a higher cost than a new college graduate. There is also some expense in recruiting candidates and spending the time to interview them, present an offer, negotiate and relocate them to your region. The market for custom IC skills is quite active, so you have to be quick to act, or else your competitors will likely hire that engineering talent.
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Fig. 1 | Custom designed A9 processor layouts from Samsung and TSMC 01
Source: Chipworks
A viable solution to assembling the right team for a custom IC design project is to hire a design services company to meet your short-term custom IC design needs.
Your group might not be designing a custom digital processor, but rather some AMS block or chip that has to be custom to meet the specifications and succeed in the market. There are far fewer qualified AMS designers in the world compared to digital designers, so these engineers are a challenge to find. Maybe you are migrating an existing custom design to a smaller node, and there are new layout dependent effects (LDE)3 at that new node. So, that requires newer EDA tools that can analyze LDE and an engineer with design experience at that new node. In your company, there can be the right engineering talent for your new custom IC design, but they might be already busy on another project and won’t be available to help start your new project. You could try and borrow engineers like that, or even have them work part-time on multiple projects. Another option is to delay the start of your new project until all of the properly skilled engineers are available from other projects. If you cannot assemble the right group of engineers for your next custom IC project in time, then the competition gains an advantage, and that typically means a loss of market share for you. Hiring new staff with experience may get you to market in time but at a higher development cost, cutting into your profitability margins. As a pragmatic compromise, you could choose to do your project with pre-built IP blocks, instead of using custom IC design. The foundries and third-party IP vendors likely have blocks that are close to what you want. However, from a marketing viewpoint, then your new design will look quite similar to everyone else’s design, and without a differentiated product your chances of growing market share are quite slim. Going back to the opening example of the smartphone market, around 90% of all profits come from just two vendors and they both use custom IC design: Apple and Samsung.
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Another way to avoid using custom design is to simply de-feature your product and remove those blocks. The pitfall with removing features is that your product is now less attractive in the market, and will affect your market share and growth. A modern business trend in the semiconductor world today is mergers and acquisitions, where smaller companies are getting acquired by larger ones to fill gaps in their product portfolios. Yes, you can go out and acquire a complete design team, although the history of M&A activity shows that between 70% to 90% of all mergers fail4, so the odds are stacked against you in buying an entire company to get the new talent. Another viable business solution is to hire a design services company to help meet your short-term custom IC design needs. All service companies are not created equal, so be sure to conduct some due diligence and consider the history of your service provider in terms of silicon success, domain experience, foundry experience, scale, reputation, culture, access to EDA tools, and security.
Recommendations for your next IC project A recommended approach to making your next custom IC project successful is to augment your existing engineering resources with additional expertise from an outsourcing vendor. In that way you can meet both your schedule and budget requirements, while at the same time reducing risk. A competent outsourced engineering team will have custom IC design experience for the particular IP block or full-chip that you plan to build, along with hands-on time with the major EDA vendor tools. Cyient is such an outsourcing partner providing semiconductor services for ASIC and SoC design, FPGA design, design verification and validation, custom layout, and
Adding an outsourced engineering team can help your company in doing custom IC design projects in several ways: • Meeting your time-to-market window • Keeping within the budget • Lowering the risks
specification to GDS II. At Cyient our team comprises of more than 350 semiconductor engineers with a variety of skills spanning specification to implementation. Also we have been serving semiconductor clients for 15 years, worldwide in North America, Europe, Taiwan, Japan, and APAC. With outsourcing, there’s always the question of remote project management, and how to communicate with engineers that are not in your local time zone. Having a local project manager from the outsourced company onsite at your location will ensure the most efficient project management, and eliminate miscommunications or surprises. Even better is when the onsite project manager is also an engineer helping your team reach its goals. When you contract with an outsourced company, then all of the custom design IP or chip is owned by you and isn’t going to be re-used by the outsourced company. This approach keeps your competitive advantage in place by not allowing your competitors to just buy the same IP, allowing your business to maintain its competitive edge. Maybe your team is considering using a new FinFET node for the first time, without any prior experience in the 16nm, 14nm or smaller nodes5. By partnering with an outsource vendor with FinFET experience, your team gets a head start with the new FinFET challenges like double patterning and how it affects IC layout, routing, DFM, process variation, and DRC. Another popular IC technology is FD-SOI6, especially where low standby power is a requirement, or ultra-low VDD levels are needed. Large companies like STMicrolectronics and IBM have been using FD-SOI technology in their custom IC design flows for many years now on a wide range of products including automotive, telecom and computer servers. Having an outsourcing
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partner with FD-SOI experience would be an advantage and enable your team to create a new design more quickly.
Benefits of outsourcing Adding an outsourced engineering team will help your company in doing custom IC design projects in several ways: • Meeting your time-to-market window • Keeping within the budget • Lowering the risks Time-to-market may be critical to your business success, so instead of trying to hire new employees and getting them up to speed which probably takes too much time and slows down your senior engineers, you could be working with a team that has already completed the kind of IP that you need with custom IC design. Hiring new employees can also be expensive, causing your project to reach its budget level quickly before you get fully staffed. With an outsourced team, you are getting experienced engineers at less cost than a direct hire, so that gets you more resources that will fit into your budget instead of exceeding it. The other benefit of outsourced engineers is that when the project is over, you don’t have the financial load of full-time employees waiting for the next project to start. Ensuring that your new IC works the first time through design and manufacturing is a difficult goal, and you can lower the risk by adding an experienced outsourced team that has accomplished this task before. Asking your existing IC design team to take on a new technology or new IP block will raise the risk on your project.
Learning about Cyient The company started out in 1991 and became a public company in 1995, growing to over 12,600 associates across 38 global locations today7. With a headquarters in Hyderabad, India, they have locations and engineers near your development teams. You can track our stock performance in India on the National Stock Exchange (NSE: CYIENT) and the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE: 532175). At Cyient, we have a track record with more than 250 ASIC tape-outs that met firstpass silicon success. We have also designed at process nodes down to 14nm, handled capacities of 100 million gates, used SOI at 22nm and 28nm for analog layouts, and worked on architectures using ARM / MIPS / PowerPC. The semiconductor IP we create for you remains with you, within your trusted computer network. You control who has access to your IP, and what level of access each engineer is allowed. Security is an important topic and one that you want assurances of proper usage to ensure that all IP stays within your control. We can also take end-to-end ownership of the project—from specification, through custom IC layout, a verified GDS II output, fabrication, packaging, test and delivery. We can serve as your full semiconductor design and implementation service provider. Our engineering team can provide your project with all of the skills needed to do a complete chip design based on your specification, which frees up your engineers to work on other projects at the same time. You’ll receive complete documentation, design entry, physical design, functional vectors, test vectors, and all of the design and fabrication files. You and your customers will be able to receive new parts from one of our semiconductor foundry partners, or whichever supplier your company has a relationship. 04
Comparing custom IC design experience Not all outsourcing companies are created equal, so make sure to ask about domain experience in the custom blocks required for your project. Our engineers have worked on a variety of IC projects like: • 802.11 router • HD image processor • Video procesor • Graphics processor • PLL (Phase-locked loops) • WLAN (Wireless LAN) • SERDES (Serializer/De-serializer) • Memory controllers • RF chip with ADC, PLLS, VGA and LDOs • Video processing • Power management ICs • Image sensors for digital cameras • LED drivers • SRAM (Static random access memories) • ADC (Analog to digital converter) • DCO (Digital controlled oscillator) Your design team may be limited in the number of custom IC designers available, so being able to add an outsourced expert will help your project scale to the right size. At Cyient, our engineers have recent experience with each of the custom IC tool flows such as Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics, making them instantly productive for your project requirements. Using commercial EDA tools will benefit your team in terms of productivity, support, and future re-use, versus being tied to internal tools with limited integration features. It’s also easier for your company to add new staff when commercial tools are being used, because of how widespread these tools have become in our design industry over the years.
Fig. 2 | 8 bit pipelined ADC with 200 MSPS, 65 nm TSMC process
Summary Custom IC design can certainly make your company more successful and differentiated in a crowded marketplace. However, reaching your project deadline on-time and on a budget can become a significant challenge.
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By adding outsourced engineering services from Cyient, you can now consider adding just the right engineers, for just the right time to complement your existing team, all at a price that is more affordable than hiring full-time employees and waiting for them to come up to speed.
25 Do’s and Don’ts for a Successful Custom IC Design Project 1. Do scope out the project size and timeline using only existing engineering resources first
14. Don’t add full-time engineers when an outsourced engineer can do the task quicker and at a more affordable price
2. Don’t de-feature the new product because your staffing level is too low
15. Do ask your outsourced partner if they have experience with Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor tools for custom IC design
3. Do add just the right outsourced engineers to complement your existing engineers 4. Don’t cut verification corners if your staffing is too limited 5. Do confirm that your outsource partner has domain experience in the customer IC block or chip requirements 6. Don’t trust an inexperienced outsourcing company 7. Do consider migrating to a smaller geometry process node with engineers that have experience at that new node 8. Don’t avoid using FDSOI to gain lower power if your engineers have never used FDSOI 9. Do partner with an outsourcing company that has FinFET experience to help lead the way on your first FinFET project 10. Don’t get stuck using proprietary, internal EDA tools when the commercial EDA tools are more productive and affordable 11. Do insist on having an on-site program manager from your outsourced partner to manage communications and coordinate efforts 12. Don’t choose an outsourcing company based solely on price 13. Do ask for a record of first-silicon success from your outsourcing company
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16. Don’t neglect LDE (layout dependent effects) at the smaller process nodes 17. Do use custom designed blocks to out-perform standard IP blocks 18. Don’t acquire a competitor expecting to be successful in custom IC design because most acquisitions fail 19. Do integrate AMS blocks into your custom IC design for added performance and differentiation 20. Don’t borrow engineers from another project to help your project catch up to schedule 21. Do get to market quicker by adding enough outsourced engineers just for the duration of a project 22. Don’t delay starting a new custom design project if your engineers are still working on other projects 23. Do choose an outsourced company that has experience with your preferred foundry 24. Don’t compromise on IP security when working with an outsourcing company 25. Do reduce risk on your custom design project by adding outsourced engineers with experience
References Wikipedia – Apple mobile application processors
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Wikipedia - Exynos
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AMD – Layout-Dependent Proximity Effects in Deep Nanoscale CMOS
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Business Review – Why do up to 90% of Mergers and Acquisitions Fail?
EE Times – FinFET challenges and solutions – custom, digital and signoff
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SOItec – Questions and Answers on Fully Depleted SOI Technology
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Cyient website - FAQs
Next steps It is possible to ensure greater success for your next custom IC design project by adding design outsourcing to your project. This approach has been demonstrated countless times before at tier-one fabless and Integrated Device Manufacturing (IDM) companies. If you are considering exploring companies with broad semiconductor domain experience, please download the whitepaper titled “15 Reasons Cyient Outshines Other Semiconductor Design Service Providers” and learn how we, with 15 years of first-pass silicon success across more than 300 semiconductor designs/tape-outs while working with bluechip semiconductor companies with the latest technology node can help you.
About Cyient Cyient is a global provider of engineering, manufacturing, data analytics, networks and operations solutions. We collaborate with our clients to achieve more and shape a better tomorrow. With decades of experience, Cyient is well positioned to solve problems. Our solutions include product development and life cycle support, process and network engineering, and data transformation and analytics. We provide expertise in the aerospace, consumer, energy, medical, oil and gas, mining, heavy equipment, semiconductor, rail transportation, telecom and utilities industries. Strong capabilities combined with a network of more than 13,100 associates across 38 global locations enable us to deliver measurable and substantial benefits to major organizations worldwide. For more information about Cyient, visit our website.
NAM Headquarters Cyient, Inc. 330 Roberts Street, Suite 400 East Hartford, CT 06108 USA T: +1 860 528 5430 F: +1 860 528 5873 EMEA Headquarters Cyient Europe Ltd. High Holborn House 52-54 High Holborn London WC1V 6RL UK T: +44 20 7404 0640 F: +44 20 7404 0664 APAC Headquarters Cyient Limited Level 1, 350 Collins Street Melbourne, Victoria, 3000 Australia T: +61 3 8605 4815 F: +61 3 8601 1180 Global Headquarters Cyient Limited Plot No. 11 Software Units Layout Infocity, Madhapur Hyderabad - 500081 India T: +91 40 6764 1000 F: +91 40 2311 0352
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Š 2016 Cyient. Cyient believes the information in this publication is accurate as of its publication date; such information is subject to change without notice. Cyient acknowledges the proprietary rights of the trademarks and product names of other companies mentioned in this document. Updated June 2016
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