Real-time quality estimation to enable process evaluation in integrated circuit development

Nowadays, managing product development projects becomes more and more challenging. Following Moorepsilas law, especially the semiconductor industry develops products of increasing complexity while minimizing time-to-market and maintaining high quality standards at the same time. Therefore, there is a strong need to improve the productivity of digital design projects. However, to be able to do so a quantification of productivity as a metric of inputs and outputs of the development processes is needed. For this reason, this paper focuses on the quality of products under development to describe one aspect of the output of design projects. A method for real-time product quality estimation of integrated circuits based on an integrated requirements and quality model is introduced. Ontologies are used to define the integrated model. The method is implemented in the performance measurement framework Permeter.