White Paper "Benchmarking IC Development for Automotive Applications"

The request for individual mobility in our society is constantly rising. Today and probably for the next decade the individual as well as commercial demands for mobility solutions are mainly fulfilled by the automotive industry.

New functions like automated driving as well as services e.g. navigation, vehicle to vehicle communication, software upgrades, …, are enabled by new highly integrated semiconductors which become more and more complex.

In parallel development cycles in the automotive industry are getting shorter and costs are facing a high pressure. To stay in this attractive and demanding market for semiconductors, the suppliers need to deal with cost pressure, shortened development cycles and rising quality demands – i.e. just being competitive and being “best in class”. But – what does the wording “best in class” mean? Lowest Cycle Time? Lowest Cost? Lowest number of silicon design Iterations?

This is widely discussed in a white paper by numetrics. Each semiconductor company might give one or the other parameter a higher relevance in their key performance indicators (KPI). But for comparison “productivity” and “throughput” are always relevant for evaluating, if the own company is working in a competitive mode. It is certainly of interest to measure the parameters “productivity” and “through-put” on several projects in the own company and to discuss, why the development of some projects performs better compared to others. But it is also of interest to widen the view and to compare the project development performance of the whole semiconductor industry in an integral and neutralised way and to derive out of that some trends for the future.

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