Happy 10th Anniversary to Open-Silicon!

Open-Silicon is celebrating another birthday! It has been 10 years since Open-Silicon began serving the semiconductor community here in the Silicon Valley and around the globe.


A Single Point of Ownership

The position of program manager is a unique role created to lead Open-Silicon’s team, the customer’s team, and the 3rd party teams in a predictable and reliable program completion.  Program managers provide a single source for complete project information to our customers.  They also act as a facilitator among different disciplines to remove roadblocks and keep customer projects on schedule and within budget.

Specifically, Open-Silicon’s program managers are responsible for monitoring a detailed task-driven schedule for each project on a daily basis. This allows them to predict schedule slippages way in advance, thereby ensuring adequate availability of time to recover from such slippages wherever possible. This increased predictability enables our customers to accurately plan their product launches and make sound business decisions that ultimatelyresult in a greater degree of success.

Our program managers deliver on our commitment to “Open” communication through-out the entire project. They deliver continuously updated information and proactively work with our engineering teams and our customers and partners teams to remove roadblocks and keep projects on schedule and within budget. Open-Silicons program managers are one of the keys to Open-Silicon’s ability to provide predictable schedules and open communication that de-risks project schedules.

Predictability and Reliability

Predictable, Reliable, Physical Design

Open-Silicon was founded on the principles of making semiconductor design predictable, reliable, and
affordable.  Open-Silicon has maintained a focus on these core competencies over the years, with a rigorous methodology for design at leading-edge process nodes into the world’s leading foundries, plus design technology to give our customer’s an edge in their market in terms of power, performance, variability management, or test.

Definitions

Predictability is the percent of designs in the last 12 months that taped out within +/- 2 weeks of the originally
committed customer schedule.

Reliability is the percent of designs that had a defect requiring a respin due to an Open-Silicon or Open-Silicon
IP partner design issue.

The Open-Silicon target for both predictability and reliability is 90%.

Impact on Market Share

Why is predictability so important?  It is well known that being late to market limits the share of market that can be gained:

In order to maximize the market share above, you need to both have silicon come out on time, and to work the first time. One without the other offers clearly little value, which is why Open-Silicon has focused since inception on both parameters as the key metrics used to measure the effectiveness of our design organization.

Company Focus

Open-Silicon does not just precisely define and measure predictability and reliability.  We also report them to the
board of directors at every board meeting and tie our executive compensation to it.  Design issues can arise from all parts of the organization, including design methodology, tools issues, customer design issues, IP, etc…  Only by focusing the entire team on these metrics can execution be ensured.

ASICView Software

The Information You Need, In One Place

ASICView™ is our web-based Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system that provides complete electronic access to detailed information throughout the entire design engineering and manufacturing stages of your project.

ASICView allows you to track exactly where your chips are as they progress through the entire chip development and delivery supply chain. Information from our design team, foundry and wafer sort partners, packaging and final test partners, and logistics team is updated in real time to ensure you always have the most current information.

Detailed charts and graphs outline the information you need instantly. With reports such as Order Status, WIP, Delivery Schedule, and BOM you are able to track your chips through all aspects of the manufacturing process.

All Open-Silicon customers are given secure access to a personalized ASICView Manufacturing web site. With ASICView you will have:

  • Visibility into all phases of the design and manufacturing process
  • Immediate access to timely information
  • Complete historical document control system
  • Easy-to-use web interface that facilitates global collaboration
  • Worldwide, 24/7 access

Do much more than Plan, Execute and Monitor your project… Logon to ASICView at https://asicview.open-silicon.com/