Semiconductor Product Development and SAP Product Lifecycle Management

You probably heard a lot of news and reports about the chip shortage everyday:

Samsung, Infineon, and NXP shut down fabs during Texas Power Crisis

Global semiconductor shortage will disrupt supply chain well into 2021

The World Is Short of Computer Chips. Here’s Why: QuickTake – Bloomberg

Now the question is why semiconductor companies can not easily expand capacity and shorten time to market?

Besides the reasons such as high investment, technology barrier, market competition and global supply chain which create dependence and vulnerability such as Geopolitics issue, Disruption, Disaster etc., in this blog, I would like to zoom into the challenges in semiconductor design. The personalization of electronics and in semiconductors is increasing rapidly the complexity which drives up quality risks and time to market in chips design and manufacturing.

From McKinsey’s report, we see the current state of semiconductor value chain

• 50% increase in time in test and verification at the design stage and factory setup.
• 12 ~ 18 months of iterative debugging time for NPI and ramp-up
• 80 ~ 90% utilization and 85 ~ 95% integrated yield at the wafer manufacturing
• About 30% of capital expenditures related to non-value added testing expense

We also see the challenges like

• only 45% of semiconductor product launches meet their original schedule
• 63% of semiconductor designs require at least one re-spin
• 42% of design projects exceed the planned budget

Industry pain points and requirements on solutions

Silos have been built up with the EDA world focused heavily on the chip design environment with some very limited PLM implementation used in the manufacturing side.  The need is driving semiconductor companies to look for ways to better manage their businesses across the enterprise.

• Industry started their open collaboration approach that involves the different organization to co-worked at the same collaboration platform that invites EDA vendors, IP providers, fabless, IDM, foundry and OSAT together to accelerate the New Product Introduction (NPI) and Technology Development.
• Industry analyst suggests a conceptual PLM platform

The BOM structure of the product has different components and parts at different stage of the development process flow. The product record contains many different data sources, like hardware, software, manufacturing and test data. The product record is spread at different stakeholder’s data repository. These data records are never integrated and synchronized with the single source in mind.

How can SAP solutions help the customer?

Together with Industry leader Siemens, SAP will deliver integrated end-to-end solutions across product lifecycle, supply chain and asset management.

• SAP will offer Siemens Teamcenter as the core foundation for product lifecycle collaboration and data management.
• Siemens will offer SAP Intelligent Asset Management solution and SAP Portfolio and Project Management to maximize business value for customers over the product and service lifecycle.

Building on the industry’s leading PLM Platform – Siemens Teamcenter – a catalyst has been developed that delivers out of the box capability to bring the end to end digital thread to semiconductors.   This will allow a fast deployment of a platform that can link the semiconductor design and manufacturing environments, and can use the power of Teamcenter to expand for future or changing needs.

Solution Benefits

• Improve NPI product capability, time to market, quality and reliability, lowering product cost
• Cost & resource management through metrics-driven prescriptive analytics
• Maintain & retrieve product records throughout the entire product/project lifecycle
• Reduced design cycles through fewer re-spins
• Rapid prototyping and deployment – OOTB (out of the box) data model

Siemens Teamcenter Integration for R&D Projects

SAP Enterprise Portfolio and Project Management is integrated with Teamcenter:

To learn more about it, please visit:

Learn to Win – Semiconductor product development management

In this blog, I introduced:

• Semiconductor Industry Mega Trends, challenges and strategic priorities
• Industry pain points product development process and requirements on solutions
• SAP Industry 4.0 strategy and solution with Teamcenter PLM for chip product lifecycle management

Looking forward to receiving your feedback and comments! You can also go to Ask a Question if you have further questions.