Impact Estimation for Design Flow Changes

Abstract:
Global markets dictate the continuous improvement of the efficiency of any industries' development processes. This is especially true for the industry of integrated circuits. Unfortunately, it is usually not obvious how one can improve development processes to stay in business. Some few time-consuming benchmark runs cannot deliver a deep insight in new process methodologies and company specific best practices. In this paper we demonstrate that it is possible to estimate the impact of process changes on effort, cost and quality in an Electronic Design Automation (EDA) flow using a defined methodology and our IMPACT tool. We simulate a design flow 10.000 times in a probabilistic manner and analyze the influence of cause-effect relationships on the development effort and costs. This approach allows the prediction of process behavior prior to the implementation of process changes.