SAN FRANCISCO — Ron Collett, president of consulting firm Collett International, introduced a design productivity management system this week at the 35th Design Automation Conference.

The system devised by Collett is intended to help design managers gauge design capacity based on what Collett terms "normalized complexity," and uses a metric based on "normalized transistors."

Collett said his firm has worked for five years on the system, which allows design managers to measure design capacity in terms of normalized transistors per week.

The increasing complexity of designs and the emergence of semiconductor vendors looking to become system-on-a-chip companies has created a dire need to increase design capacity, Collett said.

There are only two ways to increase design capacity, according to Collett: add more people or increase productivity.

"As a long-term strategy, throwing more people into projects is only viable if your company is shipping on the order of 80 million microprocessors a year," said Collett. "If we assume a modest growth in design-team size, a slight decrease in cycle time and a 50 percent increase in the amount of reuse circuitry on our year 2000 system-on-a-chip, the productivity associated with design new circuitry must double and reuse productivity must improve by a factor of 10. Very few companies are going to be able to do that.

"To talk about increasing productivity, we have to get a firm grasp on its definition," he said. "Manufacturing productivity is well understood: it is simply value added divided by labor input. Simply put, value added is the purchase price of a product and the cost of the materials that went in to making the product. Design productivity, however, is another story. The denominator is straightforward. Again it is labor input, which is man weeks, but the numerator is much more difficult. What is the value added? And how do we measure it? Is it RTL, gates, polygons? What is meaningful?

"The truth is that none of these are meaningful," Collett said. "The simplest measure is transistors? But if we use transistors we end up with a metric for transistors per man-week. This is wholly unsatisfactory because not all transistors are equal in complexity. For example, analog circuits are typically much more difficult create than digital logic."

To analyze complexity to get a meaningful perspective on value added, Collett said it is important to measure each transistor and to classify it according to complexity, and then to weigh it in the summation of the chip's total transistor count.

"Complexity is a function of design difficulty, and design difficulty is a function of many parameters, such as circuit type, frequency, process geometry, architectural complexity," he said.

Capturing data from a number of semiconductor companies, Collett normalized the data for each company to account for differences in design complexity and then created what he calls a true comparison in productivity.

"With this new system," Collett said, "we can now predict how much design productivity needs to improve to implement our average million-gate chip in a given cycle time, with a given design team size, and a given amount of new and reused circuitry."

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