Advancing Requirements Engineering in Semiconductor

The speakers of a webinar on the topic of requirements engineering for semiconductor.

This blog is a recap of our recent webinar. To watch the entire presentation, visit “Advancing Requirements Engineering in Semiconductor.”

Evolving Requirements Engineering: A Framework for the Semiconductor Industry

Unlike other industries, the semiconductor sector has no governing standards or regulations for developing and managing requirements and product data— despite being critical components of products across nearly every regulated industry. This absence makes aligning key methods and practices a critical lever for improving quality, reducing rework, and gaining a competitive edge.

In this webinar, Sarah Gregory, Principal Consultant, Systems & Requirements at Crary Labs LLC, and Steve Rush, Principal Solutions Consultant at Jama Software, explore how voluntary alignment on requirements engineering practices can elevate your processes.

What You’ll Learn:

The current state of requirements engineering in the semiconductor industry
The value of selective movement to common ground
“Common enough” methods that deliver measurable improvements
How to use the Jama Connect^® for Semiconductor Framework and Procedure Guide

Whether you’re defining your next generation of chips or improving process maturity across design teams, this webinar will help you align, simplify, and elevate your requirements engineering practices.

WEBINAR PREVIEW BELOW, CLICK HERE FOR FULL WEBINAR

WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT PREVIEW BELOW

Advancing Requirements Engineering in Semiconductor

Sarah Gregory: Thanks everybody for joining us today for a discussion about requirements engineering in the semiconductor industry. After over 20 years of tackling challenges of requirements within a semiconductor company myself, it’s really great to be collaborating with the folks at Jama Software on the upcoming launch of a Jama Connect solution that’s tailored for what we do. This webinar is an introduction to that solution, kind of a soft launch of a broader set of resources that will be released in just a couple of weeks, significantly expanding Jama Software’s engagement in a sector in so many ways that’s foundational to industries overall. In this webinar, we’re going to give a brief overview of the current state of semiconductor requirements practice. We’ll talk through some challenges that are common to semiconductor, some are drawn from my own industry experience, but also from outside research publications and collaborations. These challenges may sound familiar to you too. And then we’ll also talk about the value of intentional movement towards aligning product development data practices both within your company and or any specific company, but also for semiconductor overall.

And we’re definitely seeing folks start to pick up on that. These aren’t alignments that a third party data model or a standard is mandating for you either, but practices that have a solid return on investment in your context both financially and in terms of quality and efficiency. Better alignment accelerates time to market and helps you respond effectively to change. A phrase that I found useful working in semiconductor about requirements as well as requirements engineering generally is common enough, not identical, not uniform, not standard even, but common enough practices that an organization or team can coalesce around in order to build some efficiencies in their product development practice. There are many ways to move toward alignment on common enough practices, but we’ll share just a few today and Steve will show you what they look like in practice if you were to choose to try them out using Jama Connect. Steve will also introduce the Jama Connect semiconductor framework that will be launching on December 4th the same day as a Jama Software hosted Digital Engineering Summit in San Jose. We’ll tell you a little bit more about that before we end today too.

And of course, we’re going to take some questions. We may not have time to catch them all in our short time together today, but please do put them in the Q&A. What we don’t get to today we’ll try to tackle over the next few weeks and we’ll make available in the semiconductor area of the Jama Software website. Let’s get started. A key first step in any collaborative engineering activity is to make sure that when you’re using a term, you’ve got a shared understanding of what that term means. When each of you signed up to attend today, you brought your own mental model of what we might mean by semiconductor, so let’s take just a minute to orient on that with the model that Jama Software uses describing eight different categories of companies. Now, this isn’t the only way to represent semiconductor and there are certainly different degrees of difference or commonality among these groupings, so don’t get wrapped around the picture here or those categories, it’s just to let you know that yes, semiconductor as comprehended by Jama Software is a very broad and diverse sector with different data management needs.

RELATED: Jama Connect Features in Five: Review Center for Semiconductor Development

Gregory: For example, the requirements for a semiconductor chip, for a chip design, they’re going to different than the requirements for litho and etch equipment to fab that chip. Companies in some of the boxes may also exist in other industry categories and they could be subject to standards in those industries as well, so it’s all a matter of what an individual company does that it informs what information they need to manage and how they need to manage that product data. It’s also possible for two companies or more in the same subsegment to manage their product data in very different ways and then for there to be commonalities in company practices across those lines too. It’s not in the scope of Steve’s and my discussion today to dig into these differences within the segments, much less different data management practices among them. Just know that the work that Jama Software is doing to support requirements engineering and data governance in the semiconductor industry, beginning with this initial release of the new semiconductor solution comprehends the scope.

We have eight categories, a lot of overlap, but just as important so many differences sometimes even within a single company within one of those categories. And it’s those differences, the scope and the breadth of them that is a challenge that in many ways is unique to the semiconductor industry. Several industries, automotive, medical devices, even some areas of oil and gas have prescriptive standards that govern how product data is structured, developed and managed. If you’ve been following Jama Software for a while you’ve possibly noticed a lot of resources that enable companies across those industries to deploy Jama Connect to manage their requirements conforming to those standards. Jama Connect has several predefined traceability information models or data models and specific templates that are purpose-built to accelerate the work of companies that need to meet those standards. In semiconductor, we don’t have such a standard at the point of product definition. You may have your own mental model of the information architecture at your company or at least in the part of the company where you’re working.

And if you happen to work in a standards-adjacent area, for example, your company or the part of the company that you’re in provides devices to automotive, standards that govern the automotive industry may be familiar to you at least for that part of your business. Otherwise, even within the same subsector in semiconductor, you’re going to find a lot of differences, a lot of divergence in how companies may architect their product data. In the absence of prescriptive standards that govern product information architecture a lot of that information architecture has just grown up organically. Now, when you look across semiconductor as a whole you might see some resemblance in some areas, but in others the information to be managed is quite different. No standards, no common regulations, very different products, all leads to a lot of divergence in practice, and that divergence can create drag and inefficiencies. Now, that points to one of the common traits across many companies in the semiconductor industry too.