The Four Seasons of Chip Design

Having been in the chip design services business for almost 20 years now, I have noticed a seasonal aspect to the business and tried to make sense of it as of course it is my job to try to manage the level of work to the greatest extent possible.  But there is no doubt that there are ups and downs in the level of business through the years that follow a roughly seasonal pattern.

The Spring Season starts around February and extends through June.  This has historically been the busiest timeframe for RFQ's and project starts.  I believe the underlying cause of this is that customers come back from the Christmas/New Year's holidays, take a few weeks to get started, and then embark on their grandiose plans for the year.  You would think this would start earlier in January; I guess it takes a while to get over the hangover from the previous year end.  It is quite easy to overload at this time and you have to be quite careful not to over-promise and under-deliver. 

The Summer Season starts in June and ends in August.  In this time you find all of your customers are either on vacation, getting ready to go on vacation, or just getting back from vacation.  As a service provider you better have some longer term projects sewn up in the Spring or this can be a very lonely time.  Just try to schedule a design review with a customer during the last week of July.

The Fall Season starts in August and ends in November.  This season provides a 'second wind' of activity.  I believe this is due to customers coming back from their summer vacation and suddenly realizing they have a ton of work to get done by the end of the year that they have totally neglected through the summer.  The key for the service provider to get back from vacation before the customers and be ready to rock.

Finally comes the Winter Season, December and January.  Like the summer, it will be quite difficult to find your customers available as they are either working their butts off to meet their own end of the year deadlines, or are out on holiday shutdown.  Hopefully you are also working your butt off to meet end of the year deadlines but God help you if you have completed your projects in the Fall and need to find new projects at this time of the year.  Better just relax and wait until the Spring.

The cure for the ups and downs of the seasons are 1) longer term projects that span significant timeframes, 2) multiple successive projects from priority customers and 3) internal IP development efforts scheduled for the slow times.  In the end it just takes some perspective on the nature of the business to get through the peaks and troughs successfully.

I wonder whether service providers in other fields see a similar pattern.  Let me know what you think.

Cost-Effective Development of Proprietary Analog IP

The independent development of innovative proprietary analog IP has always been a challenge for small design firms such as MIE Labs.  Such firms are typically self-funded through the design service revenues that they generate.  The process of taking a circuit concept through the entire design cycle through prototype validation is very costly and time consuming.  Without a paying customer behind this effort, this scope of effort is rarely justifiable or even feasible.  On the other hand, having a growing library of innovative analog IP is critical for the efficient development of analog IC products as well as providing a level of comfort to prospective customers that technical risk has been addressed to the greatest extent possible prior to undertaking a challenging product design effort.  The development of this sort of IP library can also provide a potential second source of revenue to the firm in the form of royalties and/or license fees to better support the operations of the design team, further enabling future IP development.

One compromise approach which addresses this issue of proprietary analog IP development is to have internal staff undertake to quickly and effectively develop new IP concepts only to the point that their performance characteristics can be readily demonstrated.  This can be accomplished in a cost-effective manner through the use of behavioral modeling and simulation.  Utilizing this approach, innovative circuit and system concepts can be relatively quickly evaluated and demonstrated.  Potential problem areas and critical performance limitations can be identified early in the development process.  Behavioral simulation models which include some non-idealities reflective of the real (transistor-level) analog circuits are utilized and therefore provide a reasonable level of confidence that performance demonstrated in a behavioral simulation can in fact be realized in a full transistor-level design moving forward.  In some cases actual transistor-level components and existing IP modules can be included in a mixed behavioral/transistor simulation (for example, actual output power FET models and parasitics used in a power switching device) in order to better represent the expected behavior of the real circuitry.

Through the judicious use of this approach, many analog circuit and product ideas can be explored quickly to a reasonable level, giving a better sense of what may be accomplished in a full transistor-level design implementation.  This technique goes a long way in demonstrating concepts and capabilities to prospective customers and partners.   Rather than simply present a draft data sheet and/or a block diagram, actual simulation results can be demonstrated under various operating conditions and specific tradeoffs can be explored ahead of time with significantly less upfront design effort.  MIE Labs is using this approach right now to flesh out some interesting analog product and IP concepts which we believe will greatly benefit our customers and partners moving forward.  If you would like to find out more, please feel free to contact me at echalfin@mielabs.com.

Leveraging a New Strategic Alliance to Better Serve Customers

It is rare that a technology service provider has all of the necessary skills and manpower in house to address every potential customer need.  This is particularly the case in small hardware service firms, and MIE Labs is no exception.  On the other hand there are many advantages to customers working directly with small firms, including flexibility, cost and expertise (not to mention the requirement in some contracts for a minimum percentage of small business participation).  So how can a customer navigate the identification and engagement of a number of small firms to ensure that the necessary capabilities and manpower are brought to bear on their project while at the same time minimizing the need for added management overhead?

To better address this need, a group of Maryland-based small technology service providers - including MIE Labs, Sensing Machines, Root3Labs and NeWo Technologies - has joined together in a new strategic alliance in order to provide our respective customers with the variety of skills and manpower needed to address their most challenging hardware development projects, while at the same time streamlining the entire process for the customer from a program management and procurement point of view.  To our customers, we provide the benefits of a single-point vendor contact while at the same time having strong coordination and cooperation between a variety of expert providers looking more like a much larger firm.

How does this all work?  When one of the alliance members identifies a customer project that requires expertise or manpower beyond their own internal capabilities, they will act as the project lead.  They will consult behind the scenes with other alliance members as needed to provide whatever additional expertise is required to fully meet the requirements of the project.  The project lead will deal directly with their customer as their single-point contact for the project, but the customer will benefit from the capabilities brought to bear by the entire alliance team.  As the project moves forward, any subcontracting between the alliance members will be handled entirely behind the scenes and the project lead will handle all internal project management tasks.

The advantages to the customer are manifest.  While working directly with a small firm with whom they are already comfortable, they will have the benefit of first-class expertise in a wide range of areas that they would be unlikely to find in any one small firm.  For the customer there is no longer a need to engage and program manage multiple individual small firms to provide expertise on a given project, while still maintaining the benefits of working with small company suppliers.  The goal of the alliance is to bring the capabilities of a larger company to bear with the nimbleness and flexibility inherent in the operation of our small company members.

This new alliance, in combination with other strategic relationships such as MIE Labs’ recent cooperative agreement with JVD, Inc. in Silicon Valley to provide backend chip production, enables us and our alliance partners to better serve our customers now and as we grow in the future.

When to Engage an Analog IC Design Consultant

There are many situations in which a product or system development firm might want to seek out and engage an analog integrated circuit (IC) design/development expert for consultation.   IC design is a small niche of the circuit design field itself, and analog IC design is in turn a tiny niche within that niche.  Strong, highly experienced analog IC design experts are relatively rare, in particular ones that are not tied in exclusively to one company as an employee.  But independent experts do exist and are quite willing and able to perform consulting services on an ad-hoc basis for those in need. 

  

It may seem at first glance to be more cost effective to have someone on staff with this type of expertise.  In reality, hiring (and keeping) someone on staff with expertise in analog IC design and development is rarely necessary or desirable in a typical product or system development company.  In fact, unless there is a significant baseline of analog IC design work being done in a given organization it does not make any sense whatsoever to try to develop this type of expertise in house.  The only way to justify doing so would be to envision a steady and growing stream (critical mass) of analog IC design work – enough to grow a group within the organization - and that is not typical in most companies that are not themselves focusing on the development and sale of analog IC devices (chips).   

That being said, in most electronic product development companies there are occasionally projects that come up where the need for an expert in analog IC design is critical, and this is where obtaining expert consulting services is the most effective solution.  Some examples of these situations are:

•  A custom analog IC design is needed for a new product for cost or performance reasons
• An obsolete IC in an existing product needs to be sourced or replicated
• For cost or performance reasons the potential options for integrating  some or all of the circuitry in a product must be evaluated
• Low  yields, poor performance or other technical concerns with existing IC devices used in a product need to be investigated and rectified
• Assistance/advice is needed in identifying and evaluating potential foundry, assembly and test vendors for an IC
• The possibility of generating a new spin of an existing IC for derivative products needs to be evaluated

The specific tasks and expertise that would justify the use of an expert analog IC design consultant are similar in all of these scenarios.   Some of the critical areas of expertise needed include:

• Detailed generation and/or review of technical specifications for an analog IC
• Evaluation of semiconductor processes - not only in technical but in economic terms
• Working successfully with missing or incomplete device modeling information
• Ability to evaluate existing ICs at the transistor level including understanding process and tracing circuitry
• Design and schematic capture of existing and new devices and simulation of critical performance specifications
• Evaluation and recommendation of fabrication, prototyping, assembly and production test options
• Prototype evaluation/characterization and validation
• Development of reference designs and application notes

In any situation, the analog IC design consultant must work closely with the rest of the product development team in order to come up with the optimal solution.  Excellent communication skills are paramount.  Independent design consultants are accustomed to this way of working and are generally very flexible in adapting to a customer’s standard processes and procedures while executing tasks that are not necessarily spelled out to the last detail.  In the best case, the analog IC design consultant will manage the IC-related tasks while interfacing closely with the customer’s Program Manager to insure a close and effective relationship.

Analog IC design is a highly specialized niche within the field of engineering, making it a difficult specialty to develop and maintain in the typical product development organization.  At the same time, in many development projects the need for this expertise is critical.  The use of a qualified analog IC design consultant in these situations can make the difference between success and failure.

How Do You Go About Engaging a Design Services Firm?

Once you have decided to explore the possibility of developing a custom integrated circuit for your new product, how do you move forward from there?  If you do not have in house IC design/development experience or expertise the most straightforward choice is to seek out a consultant or design services firm specializing in custom integrated circuit design and development.  In particular when the product is heavy on analog content (i.e. big ‘A’ little ‘d’) this can be the best approach given the specialized knowledge and expertise required in the still-arcane field of analog IC design.

A quick search on Google for ‘custom analog IC design services’ will yield a number of firms both in the search results as well as the associated Adwords advertisements on the page.  You will need to investigate these once you have determined and ranked the criteria you intend to base your decision on.  These criteria could include:

• Location/geography
• Demonstrated experience in the given application space
• Capabilities of the firm
• Flexibility of engagement model
• Resources

Once you have identified a number of potential candidate firms and reviewed the material on their websites, the next step is to contact them for a preliminary discussion in which you can get a good sense of their capabilities and focus.  If you have a preliminary spec or datasheet for your product that can be disclosed without an NDA it would be good to give the firm a chance to review it at this time to provide you with some initial feedback.   This first interaction (be it by phone or email) will also give you a gut check on things such as responsiveness, communication style and general interest level in your project.   When you have identified one or more firms that you feel comfortable with and have indicated that your project is something they feel comfortable with and have a strong interest in working on, it is time to move on to the next steps.

At this point it is standard operating procedure to initiate a mutual NDA with the firm.  This will provide a comfort level on both sides to disclose proprietary details necessary to move the discussion forward.  There are many standard NDA forms available online, or your attorney can draft one.  In general it makes the most sense for you to provide the NDA since at this point you are the primary discloser.  In any event is typical that the larger firm in the transaction will generally provide the boilerplate NDA form to the other.  Once executed, a deeper dive into the technical and business related details can ensue.  Proprietary documentation can now be exchanged and discussed freely. 

Once the services firm has had a chance for their technical staff to review your documentation and requirements, a telecon or face to face meeting between the technical staff of each party is the next step in the process.  In this meeting questions and clarifications can be exchanged in order to insure the best possible understanding of the task at hand between the parties.  In parallel the program and business managers on both sides can discuss the framework of the working relationship including details such as business model, costs, schedule, program management, formal review process, etc. The end goal is to give the design services firm all the information required in order to provide you with a detailed technical, schedule and cost proposal, and at the same time help crystallize your requirements and priorities.

Now the design services firm will go to work.  Developing a detailed technical proposal is typically quite time consuming and represents a significant investment by the firm.  There may be ongoing discussions back and forth in order to iron out any remaining questions and details.  It is critical given the work involved that the proposal properly address all of your requirements and concerns adequately and to that end good communication in this phase is the key.  In general a good proposal will include most or all of the following sections:

• Introduction
• Project Overview
• Development Approach
• Technical Discussion/Tradeoffs
• Detailed Statement of Work
• Schedule Estimate
• Costs
• IP Considerations
• Other Considerations

A strong and detailed proposal will go a long way to help you make the final decision on whether or not it makes sense to move forward with your project.  Additionally, if you entertain proposals from more than one design services firm you can take this opportunity to compare and contrast the proposals and proposed technical approach as well as costs and schedule.  If even after everyone’s best efforts the proposal does not meet the project requirements often a second round clarification is called for as it may be that there has been a miscommunication or misunderstanding of relative project priorities in the first round.

In the end the proposal and especially the statement of work will form the guideline and reference for the project once the go-ahead is given, enabling you and the design services firm to be on the same page.  

In summary, properly engaging with a design services firm is critical to setting up your project to be successfully executed.  These initial phases represent a significant amount of work and communication by both parties but a strong effort in this phase will be a good indicator of how the project itself will proceed.