Digital continuity for the semiconductor industry

Digital continuity will boost efficiency and profits for semiconductor companies

Learn about major semiconductor industry trends, why digital continuity is important to the sector, and what companies can do to create this continuity.

Semiconductors are the backbone of modern technology, and their importance is growing as society becomes increasingly reliant on digital technologies. The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT), autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence (AI), and 5G networks all require sophisticated semiconductor technology. These advancements require faster, more energy-efficient, and smaller semiconductors.

This means semiconductor manufacturers must produce more efficiently while maintaining margins, and dealing with fluctuations of demand and uncertainty of supply. Central to this will be managing the requirements of the product lifecycle: the mix of chip complexity, the need for specialized “mission-specific” chips, regulatory constraints, and various other challenges. Better management will lead to R&D, operational and margin efficiency, and decrease time to market by enabling digital continuity across systems.

Semiconductor industry trends

These priorities are playing out among a number of critical trends.

• The importance of partnering and selling across vertical industries. Next-gen technologies,  such as AI, metaverse, 5G, and Edge, are driving partnerships across the semiconductor ecosystem to deliver complete end-market platforms.

• 5G connectivity and emerging use cases. Next-gen connectivity, from wired and wireless networks to private 5G, is revolutionizing use cases across industries .

• In-house chip design. Semiconductor manufacturers are losing share to a growing number of product and system companies which are designing chips in-house, allowing them to disrupt, differentiate, and control the supply chain.

• Industry 4.0 and fully automated manufacturing. Digitization is creating an array of challenges and opportunities related to collecting, managing, processing, analyzing, visualizing, and effectively utilizing data – a microchip-hungry endeavor.

• Increased product innovation and reimagined customer experiences. There is an increased focus on co-innovation and co-design, with the goal of establishing digital continuity and a single source of truth (SSoT) for all product data. The intent is to accelerate product innovation and delight customers.

• The value of Moore’s Law is diminishing. Semiconductor manufacturers traditionally competed on performance, power, and area (PPA), but others are adding value by producing customizable modular chips called “chiplets” that can be combined to form a complete system-on-chip (SoC).

Digital continuity takes center stage

Digital continuity is an organization’s ability to maintain and use important information, despite ongoing changes to the organization’s ways of storing data, and evolutions in digital technology. This allows an organization to connect the digital threads (information flows) of this data across its systems. Through this intelligent information sharing and monitoring, digital continuity helps the company and its ecosystem operate more efficiently.  

The ability to manage information will be a competitive differentiator. Success for companies that produce these chips will depend on faster time to market, with a “first-time right” approach . Geopolitical changes and challenges, such as some countries “reshoring” production for national security purposes, will continue to force the localization of production, and these new greenfield plants will only be able to meet the required pace with the right PLM backbone and digital continuity foundations.

The previous approach to development used custom homegrown disconnected systems and this resulted in misaligned technical investments and technical debt – namely the accumulated cost of shortcuts taken during software development, creating increased complexity and maintenance efforts over time.

The traditional document-centric development approach often does not allow traceability between requirements, product design, or the front and back-end manufacturing of products. This loss of traceability creates additional costs, quality control issues, compliance risks, and sustainability overheads for enterprises.

As such, there is a clear need for an industrialized PLM backbone that provides a single source of truth (SSoT), offering consistency, accuracy, and reliability in the use of data and information across all departments and processes. In addition, rapid integration into end-user product ecosystems (which is required to meet the competitive pace of business today) requires the use of simulation and model-based approaches.

Effective PLM backbones are built on specific requirements:

• A complex hierarchical data model. Oversight of variables like chip order part numbers and customer part numbers is important, as are management of complex chip design, development and verification and tapeout, and finalized die designs. Other capabilities would include register-transfer layer (RTL) design, GDSII data management, and mask set management, along with control over reticles and die variants, wafer fabrication and sort and, ultimately, the chip assembly process to the final product.
  This data model would also address product complexity and technology development needs for downstream systems to design and manufacture products. These include engineering bills of materials (EBOM), manufacturing bills of materials (MBOM), and production bills of materials (PBOM).

• Management of new product introduction (NPI) programs and product portfolios. This will meet the need for new markets, changing consumer demand and emerging technologies.

• Integrated fabless and foundry management. Designs are then ready to hand over to approved foundries or to outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT).

• IP management. Providing integrated IP reuse that is controlled and secured, transparent IP management increases efficiency in R&D, operations, and margin efficiency – while avoiding the risk of IP infringement.

• Product sustainability and environmental compliance. Offering integrated material substance declarations and compliance checks for Integrated Device Manufacturer and Original Design Manufacturer compliance management ultimately helps increase the effectiveness of semiconductor equipment, moving us towards the future of sustainability compliance in the factory.  

With all the above, the semiconductor industry is looking to build integrated close-loop quality system tracking into its design and manufacturing processes.

This presents an opportunity

Once the hard work has been done to establish digital continuity across an organization’s many systems, companies can expect increased efficiency in R&D, operations, and margins, decreased time to market, and a significant competitive advantage.

Semiconductor manufacturers will only be able to support the next generation of technology with the kind of digital continuity that sophisticated PLM provides.

Capgemini’s world-class team of semiconductor industry experts is ready to help you build a next-gen secure, intelligent PLM backbone for your semiconductor business.  Our VLSI practice experts can be an integral part of your team, working closely with your business product managers and fab leadership team. We also offer pre-configured semiconductor solutions and accelerators for PLM, MES, and ERP triptych products – to help you bring everything together.