How to improve semiconductor lifecycle traceability and product quality

In today's rapidly changing semiconductor market, achieving end-to-end traceability and a high level of product quality are essential to competing successfully. How do business leaders meet this challenge?

Achieving today's increasingly higher standards for traceability and quality comes down to one factor: digital transformation. Without true digitalization throughout the product development process from front to back, companies will begin to fall behind the competition.

Digital transformation helps you harmonize all semiconductor design and manufacturing process data into a single source of truth for the entire product lifecycle from concept to delivery.

Learn more about the keys to semiconductor traceability and quality in this new ebook.

Why end-to-end semiconductor traceability is critical

Since it was built on legacy and homegrown systems, the semiconductor industry simply cannot scale to meet the complexity of the explosion in demand. These fragmented legacy systems are unconnected without a common data platform or common language across systems, making them unable to talk to one another. Essential design, engineering, and manufacturing functions exist in silos.

Also, there is a lack of visibility between electronic design automation (EDA)/design management tools and product lifecycle management (PLM) tools. As a result, engineers waste time finding the information they need from various systems. The lack of visibility from disparate systems inhibits intellectual property (IP) re-use and makes end-to-end traceability nearly impossible, creating more technical debt for these companies.

How to maximize semiconductor reliability with quality control

As semiconductor manufacturers deliver more of the system through integration, there is more pressure for high quality and increased traceability. From mission-critical applications like autonomous vehicles and medical applications to consumer markets, semiconductor companies are increasingly responsible for system defects attributed to ICs, modules, and components that fail.

For example, OEMs hold integrated circuit (IC) manufacturers to higher accountability standards. These manufacturers can improve quality by linking requirements to functional, logical and physical implementation so you can verify and validate requirements. In addition, they can improve quality by managing product-related information across the extended enterprise over the entire cycle from customer requirements to tape-out to the foundry.

All product data elements are incorporated and tied to critical processes and tasks from requirements to final delivered chip to trace defects easily.

Complete semiconductor lifecycle control from EDA and PLM

Chipmakers can achieve end-to-end insight with a single source of truth for the entire semiconductor lifecycle from EDA to PLM. Increasing time pressures and the lack of system enforcement led to non-traceable and erroneous tapeout processes. Every step of the tapeout workflow consumes and generates data, and an effective tapeout process is critical to avoiding late error discovery and significant increases in costs. Failed tapeout designs result in costly spins, resulting in unforeseen costs, delays of product launches, and dashing plans to be the first in market.

To minimize time, proper documentation, authorization, and system-driven checklists are often missed for the vital tapeout process, leaving you vulnerable to making a mistake or overlooking something critical. A workflow-driven tapeout process ensures the efficiency, data integrity, manufacturability, and on-time delivery of tapeout data, from design to manufacture.

Gain accurate semiconductor lifecycle traceability reporting

With PLM, a lifecycle traceability report for a product revision shows how the different objects – from a digital asset to the physical asset – are connected, creating a single digital thread from design to manufacturing. The report addresses real-time reporting and decision-making and real-time root-cause analysis, identifies IP revisions for a specific design and establishes attribution while enabling continuous improvement, yield improvement and more.