Semiconductor IP News and Trends Blog

Compliance Traceability, Variant Design and Social Experiences

Today’s product developers face challenges ranging from traceability, mass customization, social experiences, megatronics, system expert limitations and IP management.

By John Blyler, Editor, “IP Insider”

In Part II of the coverage of system trends, the focus shifts to compliance traceability for non-automotive companies, early life-cycle planning for variant designs, social expectations before design, the need for more system experts than data analysts and how AI drives IP and acquisitions. To address these trends, John Blyler talked with Olivier De Percin, VP, Digital and Industry, and Louis Feinstein, Global Director High Tech Sales at Dassault Systemes during the 2019 3DExperience event (see Figure 1). What follows is a portion of that conversation. – JB

Blyler: What trends do you see in the system engineering space?

Percin: The big market drivers we see are the traditional ones of shorter cycle times, faster time to market, better quality and the like. But to achieve this requires a systems approach.

Blyler: Which systems approach do you mean? Software developers have one approach, IT folks have another, and hardware guys follow still another (less Agile-based) approach in their development activities.

Percin: Yes, exactly. That is the challenge. Most follow their own systems approach but we push a systems-of-systems (SoS) approach that emphasizes the need for requirements, traceability and project management. Traceability is really critical for semiconductor customers trying to get into the automotive space but have trouble with the management of data – a requirement for ISO 26262 compliance.

Feinstein: Compliance is a big issue especially for companies that are not traditional automotive designers or suppliers. Rather, they build sensors or technologies that are now being used in vehicles. It’s a whole new change because a lot of these companies don’t have requirements management or traceability tools. The other challenge for these companies and system integrators is dealing with multiple disciplines that are really a bunch of silos. This is why a single source of truth is important.

Percin: Another example of the need for traceability is in the telecoms industry. Here, the challenge is with 5G systems. To my knowledge, only 20% of the standard is specified. It’s basically a moving target. Thus, vendors will not have traceability back to the complete standard. As the standard evolves, it will become a nightmare for vendors from the number of different products since 5G will be everywhere, not just in networks but in any of your devices.

Blyler: Have you seen any other market trends worth mentioning?

Percin: Another one is mass customization, which requires the management of a lot of variants of a product. Hence our focus on systems modularity planning early in the design cycle. Mass customizations in the design will mean having many variants in the field. So it’s important to plan out these variant, to early on create an entire product solution that is totally virtual. Our platform will do that as well as create marketing material with rendering done so well you’ll think it is real. But it isn’t and nothing has yet been manufactured. It’s a great advantage and cost savings to go to your channels to test out new products before having to create a hardware prototype or manufacture anything (see Figure 1). If the product is not the right one, then you simply go back to the drawing board.

Figure 1: In the playground demo, the sharing of data enables product development from the ideation stage through design, manufacturing and point-of-sale. The product shown here is the “BEAMY 2” Smart Speaker device shown on the 3DExperience platform

Feinstein: Many companies are rediscovering the ideation or brainstorming phase of product development by creating virtual products. These virtualizations are often derived from social media inputs, before the engineers actually have much input.

Percin: The reason we have these tools is that product creation is not really about products anymore. It is about the user experience. The product ideation phase is so important to gather user experiences and test out expectations. It’s like social engineering of the product.

Blyler: Is this creation of virtual products before any engineering work has been done an extension of digital twin concept but pushed back to the ideation phase?

Percin: A word that I’ve heard often in high tech is “continuous.” This typically implies a connection between your manufacturing department and the rest of the company. They need to be closely connected. But it goes much further than to include product feedback into your design at the ideation stage. It is a continuous process of improvement. Today, the innovation loop is still really a closed loop process with little feedback on the product to be designed and manufactured.

Blyler: It is certainly easy to see the value and application of virtual product creation in the software world. But is that really true in today’s hardware space, e.g., chips, boards, subsystems, etc.

Percin: Ah, that was my next point. Software allows you to do the innovation loop-back in an open fashion. It will allow you to actually do the variance design without having to redo your entire product. It will give more flexibility to your intelligence including the hardware choices.

Feinstein: Today, people crave electronics in their product. Even in the recent past, most products were normally mechanical. Embedded software has played a big part in adding electronics to mechanical systems. Plus, adding electronics has really changed the user experience. Yesterday’s mechanical scale that showed your weight has been replaces by one that not only talks to you but gives you additional information like your body mass index. Industry craves the electronic experience as well. Think about robots and cobots! It’s a whole different experience.

Olivier: These experiences come from this megatronic trend, where mechanical, electronics and software come together. That is why it’s so important to have a way to handle all of this technologies and domains with one data model for all of it.

Blyler: Megatronics suggests a move toward the larger system-of-systems space. Is that accurate?

Percin: Yes, that’s why there is an ongoing trend of the semiconductor space expanding beyond its traditional players. In addition to being differentiated by ones software, hardware is a big differentiator. You can see this especially in the telecom industry, in which I spent many years. Many telecoms and other companies have never made their own semiconductor chip and they now find themselves in a weak spot compare to companies that have their own chips.

Blyler: Facebook has recently announced development of their own chips, joining other social media giants like Apple, Amazon, and Google.

Percin: Yes. Several newer technologies like AI require specific designs. But that is still not yet mainstream. So there’s an opportunity to really specialize and innovate and differentiate there. This is a really big trend to me. It doesn’t mean these companies will manufacture their own chips, but they will certainly control the design.

Blyler: Such activities will need to rely heavily on company specific and third party semiconductor intellectual property (IP). Will this be another growth trend?

Percin: IP and acquiring other companies will continue to be a grow trend. Countries like China are investing massively in that space. IP development-management and acquisitions are seen as strategic assets for these companies. (See, “Top 10 Lessons Learned about IP Management”).

Feinstein: The other challenge we are facing is a shortage of talent, of system level designers. You need to have systems architect and a systems engineer because the systems have become systems of systems – involving EEs, MEs, manufacturing engineers and everyone else.

Percin: A few years ago, the big thing was to encourage young people to become data analyst due to all the big data. But today I see that the systems capabilities are missing the technical workforce.

Blyler: Since system engineers really manage the process at the interfaces between discipline and domains – like hardware and software – perhaps what is really needed are more system integrators.

Percin: The systems expert is becoming a must have person. The viewpoint of the entire system is needed from the beginning to the very end of the product process. But that end-to-end integration goes against existing silos between EEs and MEs, between hardware and software. It’s no longer a question of a nice to have (i.e., the systems viewpoint). If you don’t have it, you cannot compete and make good products in shrinking times to market.

Blyler: Thank you.