EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The status quo of requirements specification in non-dedicated authoring tools is no longer an option due to increased complexity/cost of post-silicon validation, increasingly stringent standards compliance, and specification quality issues due to reuse and best practice negligence. Fortunately, there are now requirements authoring tools that solve all of these issues by emphasizing authoring requirements right the first time by leveraging automated compliance, best practice, and consistency checks.

THE STATE OF REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING FOR SEMICONDUCTOR PROJECTS

The semiconductor product requirements document has become so complicated that requirements management 101 is becoming more sophisticated by the day. Engineers understand that and are keeping up with the increasing levels of complexity, but it gets harder and more challenging to keep the executive decision-makers up to speed, so they implement marketing strategies that make sense for growth and innovation. The challenge arises because of the modern development environment of 5G communications and the ever-growing Internet of Things (IoT) markets.

The status quo of semiconductor requirements specification in non-dedicated authoring tools is no longer an option due to increased complexity/cost of post-silicon validation increasingly stringent standards compliance, and specification quality issues due to reuse and best practice negligence. If we look closely at the use case for developing requirements involving Marketing Requirements Documents (MRD), Product Requirements Documents (PRD), and technical specifications that run into the hundreds of pages, as well as the cross-functional deliverables that they apply to such as ecosystems of die, software, and firmware, we see that all of these complicated factors combined with the challenges of advanced reasoning algorithms, demands on semiconductor memory, and emerging sensor technologies, companies executives and stakeholders are in over their heads in delivering what their customers demand at an expected time-to-market.

USE CASE FOR SEMICONDUCTOR REQUIREMENTS DEVELOPMENT

Deloitte, in their July 2018 paper, IoT Opportunity in the World of Semiconductor Companies, developed an approach on how to deal with these massive levels of requirements complexity in a system of systems engineering view of the challenge.

The first thing to do is to recognize the constraints on your requirements development environment. We’ve subtly hinted at the issue, but let’s say it out loud. The situation in which you are doing your semiconductor project initiation work is not static. It’s a dynamic, constantly changing system. It would be best if you embraced those changes and champion a change requirements atmosphere within the project team. The best thing to do is understand what is forcing the changes and change your tack accordingly.

Let’s look at four changing features of semiconductor design.

1. Increasing the performance of the semiconductor device no longer holds the power it once did. Moore’s Law has reached a level of constraint. Semiconductor product performance has peaked. The density of transistors on a chip is maxed out. New materials and new innovative methods must assume the challenge, and that’s a more difficult proposition. Traditional physics must give way to quantum physics with more RDT&E investments headed in that direction. However, the maturity of that technology is still years in the future.
2. The semiconductor device market is a commodity market now with competitive equality among the players. There are many companies, large and small in the mix. The profit margins are razor-thin. As noted above RDT&E efforts will focus on emerging tech, where growth and innovation has a better ROI. That includes shifting elite technical talent to new endeavours so that companies can retain their valuable employees. Smaller companies are taking on the job of innovation, given that their growth strategies are better suited to these new limited semiconductor capability improvements.
3. Larger companies are now forced to seek partnerships with smaller companies to maintain their profit margins if we carry forward the logic and reasoning from the previous two points. The RDT&E burden will then be a shared effort with larger companies providing seed money to their smaller partners. Thus, the risk is shared, and the inevitable failures of semiconductor projects based on misdirected requirements will be offset with other semiconductor projects that succeed and fuel the growth of both the large company and its orbit of smaller partners.
4. What we have introduced is an innovative process disruption in the technology value chain. The smaller companies will pursue more automation and integration initiatives in building a real system of systems concept to deliver Industry 4.0 actions of developing faster-to-market and cheaper semiconductor technology through more accessible, smooth and efficient open-source API’s and dynamic architectures. In other words, bury the technical complexity under automation and open-source development.

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