These days, the only way to get complex electronic products to market on time is to be able to ýcut and pasteý as many already completed and tested design blocks as possible. These virtual components can come from outside suppliers, library vendors, subcontractors, or internal design-reuse vaults, as well as commercial partners sharing in the development process. The flow of this information across these resources forms a very complex development supply- chain (DSC) very much like the more familiar manufacturing supply-chain (MSC). Competitive companies have learned that, in today's market, the battle is no longer company against company, but supply chain against supply chain. Since the MSC is more mature, it helps to examine and learn from the techniques applied within it.

The primary goal of a MSC is to shorten the time it takes to turn raw materials into physical components, to assemble those components into products, and to get those products to the end customer. Optimization of the MSC focuses on improving logistics, capacity, and the manufacturing process. Efficiently warehousing and transporting raw materials and components around the world require large IT systems that are, unfortunately, expensive to manage.

Many major players in this area - for example, SAP (Walldorf, Germany), I2 (Dallas, TX), and Agile Software (San Jose) - are using the Internet as a software platform to solve this multi-site planning problem. They help their clients reduce transportation and storage costs and add millions to their revenue dollars by making sure products get where customers most want them. Until recently, however, little consideration has been given to developing similar systems for managing the complex supply chain of design information needed for the development of electronic products. Perfecting this DSC will offer the next competitive advantage for electronics companies.

The goals of the emerging DSCs are similar to the MSCs. They have to shorten the time from concept to manufacturing handoff and keep tight control of quality. Both chains also need to support operations spread around the globe.

One interesting difference between the manufacturing-and development-supply chains is that deliverables moving through the DSC are just electronic data, which can be sent through Internet connections. This makes transportation optimization easier than routing trains and trucks in an MSC. There are, however, still bandwidth and storage issues in the DSC for which clever techniques such as LAN caching and file data-storage can help out. However, totally new challenges appear because of the fluid nature of design data. Design information in the DSC often changes rapidly and it can be lethal to design using the wrong version of a component.

There are also other factors in DSC to consider, such as the need to build up a portfolio of virtual components for design reuse and managing a virtual-project team. Effective design reuse has increasingly been looked upon as the keystone to design productivity. A virtual component portfolio serves as a sometimes-overlooked factor important for both commercial and technical reason - a company that garners a high quality and differentiating virtual-component bank can also use that resource to broker strategic partnerships.

How to measure electrons

These intangible virtual components differ greatly from their physical counterparts in their need to be protected from copyright and trade-secret abuses. Their quality is also much harder to gauge. For example, unlike a physical component that, once produced, will work in most intended applications, a soft USB core that has been implemented for a particular foundry process probably won't work on a different one.

Solving these issues is the driving force behind portals such as the Virtual Component Exchange (VCX), which is attacking the maze of virtual component legal and business issues, and Synopsys' ( Mountain View, CA) IP Catalyst Catalog that offers the Open MORE rating standard to gauge quality. The Rapid portal also aggregates hundreds of the most innovative virtual components in the industry. Without the assistance of these types of extended enterprise resources, companies are limited to their existing partners - in essence, placing a cap on their competitiveness.

Security of virtual components is another key issue. It's not easy to make unlimited copies of a physical component just by taking delivery of it. But to prevent undesired copying of your virtual components, databases and management systems must include encryption, access controls, and tracking technologies such as digital watermarking. Synopsys' Verilog and VHDL Model Compiler (VMC) exemplifies a tool that can address providers' concerns through the encryption of virtual components. Similarily, Synchronicity's (Malboro, MA) IP Gear allows you to build a design-reuse infrastructure to ensure that virtual components are published, distributed, and supported in a secure and controlled manner.

Figure 1 - Development supply chain

The development supply chain has to network all the different suppliers of virtual components.

The global specialization and segmentation of engineering resources is driving the formation of virtual- project teams. Pure-play foundries like TSMC (Taiwan) and Chartered (Singapore) epitomize this segmentation. But even they have to work closely with designers before anything can be produced. In the IP arena, this trend can be seen in the form of specialized virtual component providers like ARM (Cambridge) and Insilicon (San Jose).

Players in the DSC include the library, virtual component and tools vendors, consulting houses, foundries, and industry web portals. What flows between these teams are design files, bug and engineering-change information, and even legal and business information.

In conventional MSCs, the principal flow consists of products and the flow is primarily in one direction. However, a true supply chain really needs a bi-directional and networked infrastructure.

For example, if the foundry changes a process-technology file, that information needs to flow to the system manufacturer, the virtual-component providers, and maybe even the tool vendors; the resulting changes also need to ripple back. Internet-based systems help tie these physically distributed teams closer. A work in progress - be it a virtual component or system-on-a-chip (SOC) development - can be developed by global teams using a single or distributed project website managed by currently available tools. Such tools allow a project website to capture both the design data and related engineering notes, while powerful event and trigger technologies enable a workflow to be put in place.

Simple as notification sounds, it's a key part of the supply chain. Event monitoring ensures that proper e-mail notification is triggered in the workflow when a team checks in a file, when regression tests are run following a block integration, or when design modules have to be re-characterized immediately after a change in design rules at the foundry. Importantly, the notification e-mail can pinpoint and even hyperlink to the relevant piece of information, no matter where the file, database, or library is located - regardless of which partner in the network owns it.

The complexity of a real-life virtual project team is demonstrated by a communication-chip development that our tools recently managed at one of our customer's sites. This project involved over 100 designers developing a 3-million transistor chip, using 10,250 hardware design files from 50 different tools that generated almost 1Gbyte of data. The designers were located at three different sites and worked with eight external suppliers - and the development needed to be completed in nine months!

A major discipline in the MSC focuses on demand forecasting; the equivalent concept in the DSC is development-project planning. Information on past buying patterns and seasonal fluctuations helps with accurate MSC forecasting. Similarly, archives of previous project data and statistics are invaluable for DSC project planning. Even more importantly, the advent of the Internet brings real-time data from all key points of the supply chains to benefit both the manufacturing and development worlds.

In the manufacturing world, physical-inventory control is key, resulting in techniques like supplier-managed inventory-control, where suppliers are encouraged to manage their own inventory at their client's site to minimize the overhead to the clients. For example, when a Dell Computer order comes in, its bill-of-materials (BOM) is disseminated to Dell's component suppliers, who in turn examine their inventory at Dell's manufacturing site and refill if needed.

Obviously, there is no physical inventory in the DSC, but the concept of supplier-managed inventory control still applies. Technology that pushes release data to customer sites is critical in eliminating slack time. For example, in Synchronicity's IP Gear, everyone who is dependent on an update is immediately notified when new information is available. This results in a minimum latency in the communication and collaboration cycle. Two-way communication also takes place through the tool's integrated Helpdesk and Knowledgebase. These features ensure that important issues don't fall through the cracks, yet allow resolved issues to be archived in the database for future project planning.

The Internet is changing how business is done in other ways such as auctions and reverse-auctions. These have been catching the imagination of savvy procurement agents at manufacturers over the last year or so. As a reverse-auction example, General Motors could publish a request for bid - specifying a particular type of bolt that it's looking for - and all bolt manufacturers can then bid for that contract electronically. This technique works well when the item is a commodity and when the suppliers are abundant.

Apples and oranges

Arguably, auctions and similar strategies will never become the norm in the DSC. Despite good progress from standards bodies like SI2 and VSIA, and business mechanisms like the VCX, resources in the DSC are generally not commodities. In addition, for a high-value virtual component, the supply-side is fairly limited.

After all, there are only a handful of suppliers of Terabit Ethernet cores in the world, and most interested buyers are probably aware of them all. When a deal is cut, in that case, eye contact and a firm handshake still takes precedence over electronic auctions.

The DSC mainly lags behind its manufacturing cousin in the level of integration of the disparate elements. To meet the ever aggressive development-cycle times and quality requirements for future projects, these elements have to become more tightly integrated across an expanding network of companies and countries. This requires a range of tools that use industry standards to address both the interoperability and quality issues. Developers of complex electronic products that implement effective DSC management systems will reap the benefits that their manufacturing counterparts enjoy - which might just prove to be the competitive advantage that keeps them way in front of their competition.