Engineering Lifecycle Management Explained: Unlock IC Design Efficiency

Key takeaways:

• Engineering lifecycle management is a holistic end-to-end process in which every stage of the IC design and manufacturing process considers every other stage's considerations.
• Engineering lifecycle management ensures bidirectional traceability for every decision and activity.
• Automation and standardization are essential strategies for implementing engineering lifecycle management.

When it comes to integrated circuit (IC) design and manufacturing, engineers have to navigate complex challenges that can pull in different directions. At the technical level, there's a constant demand for more powerful, smaller, and more efficient chips. At the business level, geopolitical headwinds have revealed supply chain vulnerabilities that must be solved through urgent acquisition and transfer of semiconductor intellectual property while ensuring regulatory compliance.

Such challenges have stretched traditional processes to their limits. A more holistic approach is needed to address them systematically.

This blog explains engineering lifecycle management, a process that advocates such a holistic approach. We will show you how it can be adopted by IC product lines and introduce you to Keysight's solutions that can help you implement it.

What is engineering lifecycle management?

Engineering lifecycle management (ELM) is a process framework for holistically managing all the stages of system development and their engineering aspects from start to finish.

In the context of IC design and manufacturing, ELM includes requirements management, IC design stages, implementation stages, verification, all the testing stages, manufacturing, change management, revision control, and bug tracking. More importantly, the management of each of these stages is holistic, meaning that the considerations of every other stage are also considered.

Engineering lifecycle management can be considered a smaller framework that focuses on engineering within the broader product lifecycle management (PLM) framework, which covers people, partnerships, and other aspects of managing complex systems.

Application lifecycle management (ALM) is another framework that's generally used for software development. Since most modern ICs are a mix of software and electronics, ALM and ELM increasingly complement each other. Many IC project managers prefer to implement a single framework that combines PLM, ELM, and ALM so that their hardware and software engineering can advance in lockstep.

Importance and benefits of ELM for integrated circuits

As outlined below, engineering lifecycle management brings several benefits to IC product lines.

Accelerated chip design processes and faster time to market

Engineering lifecycle management uses intellectual property (IP) catalogs to enable engineers to efficiently search and select suitable pre-verified IP blocks for their designs. This drastically speeds up the product development process because engineers don't have to design every function from scratch. They can simply reuse existing proven IPs from other teams or external vendors.

In the fast-paced consumer electronics industry, this allows companies to reduce their time to market while keeping up with customer demands and technical advances.

Comprehensive traceability and accountability throughout the product lifecycle

Engineering lifecycle management implements comprehensive traceability from any decision or action in one stage to decisions and actions in another stage.

It does this by implementing:

• Version control for all design data.
• Long-term tracking of metadata related to design changes — who made them, when they were made, why they were made, who approved them, and so on.
• Design document management.
• Issue tracking.
• Dependency tracking between semiconductor IP blocks.
• Discussion and collaboration tools for sharing knowledge and information across teams.

Long-term reliability, safety, and product quality improvements

Engineering lifecycle management improves these aspects through the following strategies:

• Design data management enables the long-term storage and retrieval of all the simulation data, verification code, and test results over the product's entire lifetime. This builds up institutional memory about a design, enabling engineers at any point in time to conduct thorough regression tests on later design iterations.
• Built-in knowledge-sharing tools allow the thinking and decisions behind a chip design to survive organizational changes and provide insights for all design and verification teams over time.
• Optimized design data storage and network transfers enable all teams, even across design centers around the globe, to see the same versions in real-time. This prevents small incompatibilities between design teams from creeping up.
• IP catalogs enable dependency awareness between IP blocks and automated verification of all affected levels within a chip design and across affected projects.
• Comprehensive traceability facilitates root-cause analyses of failures and accountability for decisions throughout the product lifecycles of chips, some of which may have been in operation for decades (for example, in automobiles and defense equipment).

Key components of IC engineering lifecycle management

Fig 1. Components of engineering lifecycle management.

An engineering lifecycle management framework for IC product lines should include the following important components:

• Requirements management: The engineering requirements management component ensures that the ICs are aligned with customer demands and change requests at all times.
• IP management: It manages the reuse of semiconductor IP blocks according to license agreements with their vendors.
• Design data management: It organizes and secures all the system design data for enterprise-wide knowledge sharing and shared understanding between development teams.
• Design collaboration: It enables efficient and widespread collaboration across distributed design teams.
• Regulatory and standards compliance management: It ensures product compliance with industry standards and regulations, especially in safety-critical industries like automotive and aerospace.
• Configuration management: Global configuration management ensures that IC design, implementation, and integration are consistent with specifications and are properly documented throughout the product's operational lifespan.
• Engineering workflow management: It involves designing, executing, automating, and standardizing IC development workflows to optimize efficiency and productivity.
• Change management: It facilitates the orderly implementation of design and manufacturing changes and documents their impact analyses systematically.
• Manufacturing data management: It manages all the engineering data related to manufacturing to streamline production.
• Verification management: It ensures that IC designs and manufactured products satisfy functional and performance requirements through rigorous testing at every level, including unit, integration, system, acceptance, and compliance tests. This includes managing, maintaining, and updating test cases and test plans over the entire lifecycle.
• Revision control: It tracks design and implementation changes and provides visual tools to help engineers understand modifications in schematics, netlists, and other process artifacts.
• Bug tracking: This includes logging, tracking, and remediating design and product defects for quality assurance throughout the lifecycle.
• Traceability: It ensures that every decision and change in any stage of the lifecycle can be traced back to a requirement or decision of any other stage.
• Model-based systems engineering: ELM encourages using design models and simulations to verify the correctness of all aspects as early as possible in the process. Uncovering problems in later stages can be very expensive.

Challenges in IC engineering lifecycle management

Fig 2. Challenges of IC ELM.

Some of the more difficult challenges in implementing ELM for IC product lines include:

• Constantly changing customer requirements and market demands in a heavily fragmented market.
• Keeping up with the innovations happening in all aspects of the industry, like chiplet-based designs, gate-all-around transistors, smaller process nodes, and extreme ultraviolet lithography.
• Obstacles in sharing knowledge and insights behind design decisions and test analyses with other design and verification teams due to a lack of purpose-built knowledge-sharing and discussion tools and leading to each team acting like a silo.
• Use of ICs in safety-critical applications, requiring more stringent control over quality and reliability at all times.
• Highly hierarchical designs with a lot of reuses (which translates to many dependencies) across projects (which complicates change management at every level).
• Early identification of product design and development issues using models and simulations due to the lack of accurate device models, lack of awareness of better models and simulations available in another design center, and lack of purpose-built tools to share past verification data and insights on the device models and simulations.

Best practices for IC engineering lifecycle management

Some best practices and insights for implementing ELM in IC product lines are laid out below.

Implement intellectual property tracking and management

Fig 3. Convenient IP search and selection using Keysight HUB.

IP management includes capabilities like:

• An enterprise-wide IP catalog.
• Automatic tracking of IP use at any level of the design hierarchy.
• Propagating changes at any level up the design hierarchy across all dependent product lines.
• Integration with existing tools and workflows.

Cataloging all the available IP cores and their metadata enables designers across the company to accelerate their IC designs by efficiently searching for proven and licensed IP blocks and reusing them instead of designing their capabilities from scratch. This drastically cuts down engineering costs and improves product quality early on.

These features bring several benefits:

• Faster design cycles because of IP reuse.
• Reduced design and manufacturing costs.
• Keeping up with constantly changing market demands and customer requirements by integrating suitable IP blocks from specialist external vendors.
• Lower project risks by avoiding designing from scratch.
• The freedom to focus more on product differentiation.
• Leveraging the latest industry advances like chiplet-based designs, gate-all-around transistors, and state-of-the-art process nodes.

Set up comprehensive design data management and knowledge sharing

To manage their IC design data, many companies try to repurpose existing version control systems meant for software projects. However, such version control systems have several drawbacks:

• Lack of awareness of IP block reuse and dependency hierarchy concepts unique to the semiconductor industry.
• Inefficient downloading and updating behaviors that are unsuitable for the large binary files prevalent in IC designs.
• Clumsy management of critical activities such as change notifications and workflow triggering.

Good engineering lifecycle management expects a much better design data management strategy. Design data management is the systematic organization, storage, retrieval, and version control of all the design-related information of ICs throughout their engineering lifecycles. It facilitates bidirectional traceability along the IC V-model and across it between the design and verification stages.

Implement design data management that is visible and available enterprise-wide to act as a single source of truth about any design knowledge for all distributed teams. This reduces the risks of small incompatibilities emerging between IC subsystems and leading to failures down the line.

The design files, simulation data, and test results associated with these and other electronic design automation tools can become very large (ranging from gigabytes to even terabytes). Downloading them on engineers' workstations or sharing them between design centers worldwide severely reduces productivity and often overwhelms the company's storage and network infrastructure.

Engineering lifecycle management requires efficient design data management. This allows engineers to access all that data on demand and enables all global centers to see the same versions of all files without overloading the infrastructure by using optimizations like:

• Cache servers to share file contents.
• Lightweight symbolic links between workstations and cache servers to avoid large downloads until absolutely necessary.
• Incremental updates to large binary files to avoid heavy uploads.

Good design data management must be aware of the reuse of IP cores and subsequent dependencies between various levels within a chip and across multiple IC designs. It must also implement version control workflows efficiently to optimize team productivity, storage capacity, and network transfers.

Another best practice is integrating collaboration and discussion tools with the design data management workflows. They help connect the knowledge silos that may have emerged within design departments and across design centers by ensuring the free flow of information and insights between various teams.

Automate all stages of the lifecycle

Look for opportunities to automate each and every design and verification workflow to the extent possible. The benefits of automating common ELM workflows are outlined below:

• Automated tracking of all IP dependencies and their hierarchy within an IC design and across design projects means that a change in an IC design at any level can be propagated to all the affected ICs and projects.
• As soon as a change is detected, automated test and verification workflows can be triggered in all the affected levels. This enables the execution of change requests with high confidence that the higher-level dependencies are not adversely impacted.

Standardize tools and workflows

Good engineering lifecycle management recognizes the value of standardizing the tools and workflows of each functional area across product lines. This flattens the learning curve for IC designers and verification engineers, boosts their productivity, drastically reduces time-to-market for chips, and reduces the overall engineering complexity across the enterprise.

Implement extensive traceability for regulatory and standards compliance

Since ICs are important components in many safety-critical industries and functions, the engineering lifecycle management framework must treat compliance with all applicable regulations and standards as a mandatory prerequisite in every workflow.

Effective engineering lifecycle management facilitates compliance by requiring end-to-end traceability of all specifications, actions, decisions, or tests from the initial requirements stage through all the design, release, field use, and maintenance stages until product retirement. This enables:

• Companies operating in regulated spaces, such as automotive, to document and track the safety requirements and verification results of vehicle ICs to comply with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 26262 standard for functional safety.
• IC vendors to track all the safety-related activities and results required by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 61508 functional safety for any electronic system.

Good engineering lifecycle management also recognizes that compliance over long product lifecycles requires robust IC design data management and tracking. This enables:

• Companies operating in regulated spaces, such as aerospace, to meet the high reliability and safety requirements of the DO-254 standards for airborne electronic equipment.
• Consumer electronics, automotive, defense, and aerospace companies to store and track the design changes, simulation predictions, and test results that demonstrate compliance with the Federal Communication Commission's or the Department of Defense's electromagnetic compatibility compliance regulations.

Use digital models and simulations

Approaches like simulation models and digital twins can help validate designs early ("shift left") and optimize performance. These tools also enable parallel development and efficient system optimization.

That's why good ELM insists on good design data management to facilitate the sharing of the best device models, simulation data, and knowledge about them across teams and design centers.

Since such data can be massive, efficient design data management also eases the friction in versioning large files and sharing them with other teams.

Keysight's engineering lifecycle management solutions

Fig 4. Keysight Design Data Management (SOS).

Keysight bridges major gaps in the semiconductor industry's ELM needs with our design data and IP management solutions for IC design and manufacturing products.

Keysight Design Data Management (SOS) is a multi-site development environment that enables global teams to efficiently collaborate and manage IC design data throughout the engineering lifecycle.

Keysight IP Management (HUB) enables semiconductor companies to catalog, reuse, publish, and track all internal and third-party silicon IPs throughout the engineering lifecycle.

Additionally, Keysight publishes convenient tools that help streamline IC engineering lifecycle management stages, like the Visual Design Diff, to visualize the changes made to schematic files.

Refine your IC engineering lifecycle management with Keysight

In this blog, we explored the framework of engineering lifecycle management and how to apply it to IC product lines. Keysight's expertise in ELM, PLM, testing, and verification helps IC companies refine and optimize product and engineering processes.

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