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In this blog post, experts from Cadence, OpsHub, and Jama Software talk about enabling digital transformation in the hardware and semiconductor industries.

The relentless pace of innovation, rapidly changing markets, and increasing product complexity are creating intense pressures on companies in the semiconductor and hardware space. Some of the biggest challenges relate to scaling effectively and efficiently within the context of digital transformations.

Organizations in all sectors are looking to support faster release cycles and accelerate innovation. Siloed and legacy tool chains create a major hurdle in accomplishing these goals.

Watch the webinar or read the recording to learn more about:

Rich collaboration
Complete traceability
Full transparency among all stakeholders
Faster releases
Improved quality and productivity

Below is an abbreviated transcript and a recording of our webinar.

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Jama Connect: the Leading Platform for Requirements

Matt Graham: Thanks everybody for joining. So today, before we get into the agenda just to introduce the three products that there are three subject matter experts about. First of all, something near and dear to my heart, the Cadence vManager, verification management platform which is a scalable, reliable and very feature rich verification planning and management solution from Cadence. That sits on top of a number of our verification and provides a sort of roll up capability. And we’ll describe it in a little more detail in a couple of slides. On the OpsHub opposite side, we’ll be looking at the OpsHub integration manager that enables enterprises to integrate their best of breed tools together that are best suited for the various teams and their various roles and connect those two together for integration and collaboration. And then Jama Connect, which is the leading platform for requirements, risk and test management to help provide that sort of end-to-end compliance solution.

Our agenda today. First we’ll look at some of the challenges of the semiconductor and hardware development ecosystem. This is obviously a very fast paced, highly competitive type of environment and there’s a lot of specific challenges that the integration of the tools I just mentioned can help address and solve. We’ll look at how engineers in this space can scale effectively and efficiently utilizing some of these, the tools to address some of the ongoing transformations in that space. And then specific to semiconductor domain, bridging the gap in what has historically been a very siloed development process. And bringing together for efficiency, quality and reliability all of the various tools that I mentioned and giving it a really nice integrated development and verification environment. We’ll then have a specific use case and demo showing how the three tools work in concert and then look at some key takeaways. And as Marie mentioned, some Q and A.

Standards for Requirements such as ISO 26262

Specifically to the semiconductor and hardware ecosystem, there are a developing set of challenges. And of course they’ve always been challenges in this area. First pass design success is critical for hardware development. Just because the tooling costs are so great. We don’t want to have to respurn hardware. It’s not like just releasing more software. It is it requires expense. But that has been the way of hardware development for some time. In the last several years we’ve seen a need creeping into that environment for even stricter compliance, particularly around mission critical domain such as aero and defense, automotive especially as self-driving and autonomous vehicles come in. And adherence to standards like ISO 26262 presents another layer of requirements and need for management and collaboration on top of an already strict set of sort of design parameters.

As I mentioned, this development environment tends to be very siloed in its nature because it is so specialist. You have specialist designers, specialists verification engineers to test the designs, specialists post silicon, specialists layout engineers and so on and so forth. And all of those silos, well somewhat required of the specialty of each of those tasks tends to hinder collaboration, compromise quality and just impact efficiency and velocity overall. In an area where efficiency and quality is critical. We can’t have bugs in semiconductors going to automotive and we need to be able to turn those new cell phones, those new mobile devices as quickly as possible. So turnaround time is just getting compressed and the requirement for quality is increasing at the same time.

RELATED: A Guide to Understanding ISO Standards

All of that sort of siloed nature of the specialties as well as the need for velocity and quality really ends up in poor traceability of results in terms of compliance and quality issues creeping in. Especially when it comes to doing things like audits for ISO and other similar standards that are becoming the requirement across again aero and defense type applications, automotive type applications and even down into the sort of consumer device applications. And really traceability is a watch word now in the ecosystem of hardware and semiconductor development.

So how does the offering from Cadence, vManager fit into and help provide a solution to those challenges that I just mentioned? Well, for a number of years now, in fact, vManager has been around for about 15 years and in that entire time it’s had the key capability of the verification plan. And the verification plan really exists to provide traceability between what is being executed during the testing or verification of your semiconductor or hardware design. And what were the goals of that or the requirements of that testing or verification project. Things like testing interfaces, both internal and external to the semiconductor, testing compliance with standards like ethernet and USB, such as that, things like that. As well as the internal requirements of the device, it must route packets this fast. It must answer phone calls in this manner or whatever it might be.

And the verification plan in vManager really allows the user to enter those requirements and then connect them to the real results that are occurring. We ran these tests, these tests were associated with a given requirement. Those tests passed therefore the requirement is satisfied. And so the V plan becomes a very natural place. And in fact the appropriate place to connect the rest of the ecosystem via OpsHub, two tool requirements coming from Jama Connect so that we can have traceability across the software development, the hardware development, whatever. The mechanical development et cetera ecosystems. And the vManager and the verification plan is really where that hardware verification, that hardware and semiconductor development information enters that ecosystem through the conduit of the verification plan. So let’s look a little bit more on, well what exactly is in that verification plan that vManager provides.

Enabling Digital Transformation: Static Documents Cause Challenges

And the V plan is really what we call, what we refer to in our vManager sort of pitch if you will as an executable verification specification or an executable verification contract. And what that means is that there’s data incoming to that during the creation, the authoring of that verification plan. Not only through connectivity to tools like Jama but also from say static documents like standards specifications, ethernet that I mentioned before, USB those are standard protocols that have very lengthy standards documents and needs to be a way to import, kind of gather the data from that and put it in the verification plan. Another input to the verification plan is other verification plans. So if you think about a system on a chip that is not a single piece of intellectual property, it’s built up of many, many different pieces, a USB piece, a central processing piece, a memory management piece and so on.

And each of those pieces can have their own verification plans for the verification at that sort of lower block level as well as then can sort of conglomerating or aggregating those verification plans into a single sort of system on a chip verification plan. And the vManager, V plan allows that through sort of parameterization and instantiation and really flexible set of sort of reuse capabilities for verification lands. And then of course just engineers authoring their verification plan. Literally writing, typing in here’s a specific requirement et cetera. And then we have the component of mapping those requirements to items that exist in the actual testing environment. Things like we have a test, did it pass or fail? What requirement is that test related to? So there’s mapping the test to a particular requirement and then did that test pass or fail. Those of you familiar with hardware verification know that tests passing and failing is not the only statistic or metric that we track.

There’s other metrics and statistics such as code coverage, functional coverage, assertion coverage, software coverage, all tracking what scenarios and what stimulus were driven to the specific device under test. And what was the reaction of the device under test? And then what percentage of the device has been exercised during that test? It is all basically statistics gathering from the testing effort. All that data can be mapped into the verification plan, directed to the specific requirement or multiple requirements that it may satisfy. And of course, this gives us the ability to not only specify a requirement, but then capture whether that requirement was met. Was it satisfied? And this is the place where I’ll hand over to Jeremy now to talk about what those requirements in those higher level requirements or system level requirements in the general world and how they’re going to connect into this hardware verification, hardware development world.

Developing autonomous vehicles requires an incredible number of moving pieces to communicate with one another. From sensors, to computers, to the automatic braking system, vehicles today require a complex system that leaves no room for error in communication.

In this blog post, we take a look at Arteris IP’s top challenges in autonomous vehicle development and why they selected Jama Connect to help.

Managing Complexities Across Remote Semiconductor IP Development

In a world of increasing automotive complexity and connectivity, developing the world’s most innovative semiconductor IP comes with a set of challenges. Arteris IP turned to Jama Software to help address these critical business challenges:

1. Adapting to Increasing Complexities in Semiconductor Development

As semiconductors get larger with more processing power and more functionality, they also become more complex and more connected. In addition to the standard complexity of semiconductor IP, Arteris IP was the first to add state-of-the-art functional safety mechanisms directly into the on-chip interconnect semiconductor IP, compounding their product development complexity.

In conjunction with their response to increasing complexity in semiconductor development, Arteris IP was also expanding their product lines from one to four, and therefore greatly increasing the number of requirements they’d need to manage.

“I find it really interesting that as the automotive industry becomes more complex, it’s becoming much riskier to base a product development process on static requirements trapped in documents. You need a living requirements thread through the end-to-end process to minimize the risk of negative outcomes and maximize productivity.”

– Kurt Shuler Vice President of Marketing Arteris IP

2. Collaborating Across Distributed Teams

With teams spread across the United States, Europe, and Asia, having clear communication and collaboration is crucial to Arteris IP’s success. The team found that sending documents and spreadsheets over email made it nearly impossible to maintain version control, and spending hours in a room reviewing requirements was not only ineffective, it was inefficient.

And while developing semiconductor IP was never an easy task, the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 added new challenges to Arteris IP as engineering teams shifted to be fully remote.

The challenge of engineering teams working remotely across multiple time zones made communication and collaboration even more vital, emphasizing the need for a solution that enabled everybody to collaborate seamlessly on a project virtually, regardless of physical location.

Jama Connect is our single source of truth. If it’s not in Jama Connect, it’s not happening. If it’s not in Jama Connect, it didn’t happen. When I tell people in the automotive industry we use Jama Software, they all know what it is. If you’re using anything other than Jama Software in the automotive industry, you’re going to get more questions.”

– Kurt Shuler Vice President of Marketing Arteris IP

3. Managing Document and Tracking Disparities Lacking in Traceability

With just Word Documents, email, and Excel spreadsheets, the Arteris IP team found themselves struggling to keep track of things due to the lack of traceability and a central source of information.

Macro-level traceability is key to the Arteris IP development process, and their current system did not provide end-to-end traceability — all the way from requirements to verification and validation. Atlassian Jira also played an important role in their development process, and the team needed a way to seamlessly link requirements to Jira and keep those in sync as things shifted.

As an innovative leader in the automotive industry, other organizations were looking to Arteris IP for guidance on development processes, quality management, and adherence to ISO 26262. They knew there must be a better way than spreadsheets and documents.

4. Proving Compliance and Providing an Audit Trail

With many of the most important Arteris IP clients being in the automotive industry, and some also in aerospace and industrial machinery, meeting regulatory standards is a critical challenge for the organization. ISO 26262 is the most important functional safety standard for Arteris IP, and proving compliance is critical. And as previously mentioned, their current solution did not provide the level of traceability necessary to prove compliance with ISO 26262.

The team needed a solution that both enables traceability and helps demonstrate that functional safety standards and industry regulations like ISO 26262 have been met during the development process.

Arteris IP Selects Jama Connect to help Develop Connected Semiconductor IP for Autonomous Vehicle Development

After considering all market options, including IBM® DOORS® Next Generation, Arteris IP selected Jama Connect as their requirements, risk, and test management solution. The decision, Kurt Shuler, VP of Marketing, said, ultimately came down to the semiconductor and automotive industry’s trust in Jama Software as an industry-leading solution.

He explained that after speaking with many of his semiconductor company and automotive Tier-1 customers, the majority of whom were replacing their outdated, legacy systems and adopting Jama Connect, he knew this was the right path for Arteris IP.

Download the full customer story to see how Jama Connect helped Arteris IP manage the complexity of developing highly sophisticated semiconductor IP by simplifying their requirements management and review processes and improving communication and visibility across distributed teams.

Read the full customer story to see how Jama Connect helps industry leader Arteris IP with autonomous vehicle development.

SEE THE FULL STORY

Editors Note: 2020 is a year we’ll never forget. But amidst a sea of setbacks, companies across the globe continue to rise to the challenge and push forward with innovative product development. Teams who have the right tools and processes in place especially across distributed teams are able to improve collaboration and speed the time it takes to deliver new, innovative products.

In our spotlight series, we highlight companies who are doing extraordinary things in the product development space, and showcase the ways that their innovations are changing the world as we know it. In this post, we applaud Arteris IP, whose network-on-chip interconnect IP continues to push the limits on innovation in the semiconductor space.

This post originally appeared on Arteris IP’s website on October 1, 2020, and can be found here.

Arteris IP, the world’s leading supplier of innovative, silicon-proven network-on-chip (NoC) interconnect intellectual property, today announced a definitive agreement with Magillem Design Services (EPA: MLMGL) under which Arteris IP will acquire the assets of Magillem Design Services (“Magillem”). Substantially all Magillem team members will be joining Arteris IP.

Arteris IP and Magillem share a passion for helping our customers create the world’s most sophisticated systems-on-chip with state-of-the-art technology that shortens design schedules and increases profit margins, so we are delighted to welcome the Magillem team into Arteris IP. As we integrate our technologies to accelerate and simplify the SoC assembly design flow, we will enhance innovation in both SoC IP integration software and the highly configurable on-chip interconnect IP that implements chip architectures.”

K. Charles Janac, President and CEO, Arteris IP

The combination of global technology leaders brings together Arteris IP’s state-of-the-art network-on-chip (NoC) interconnect IP with Magillem’s leading chip design and assembly environment, creating the premier semiconductor IP and software tools company for the age of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The company will accelerate the pace of innovation and the ease-of-design for the complex systems-on-chip (SoC) that power this computing revolution, which is transforming automotive, machine learning and 5G wireless communications markets.

As part of Arteris IP, Magillem’s software products will continue to be offered separately from the Arteris interconnect IP offerings and the joined company will continue to execute on Magillem’s existing product and technology roadmaps. Both Arteris IP’s and Magillem’s existing worldwide SoC design team customers will benefit not only from the increased engineering and global support resources of the combined company, but also from the technology integration between the two companies’ product lines that will occur over time. The combined entity will be the leader in SoC assembly solutions to improve how SoCs are designed today and in the future.

“The combination of Arteris IP and Magillem will provide unparalleled global support and technology advancements for existing Arteris IP and Magillem licensees,” said Isabelle Geday, founder and CEO of Magillem Design Systems. “In addition to sharing many mutual customers worldwide, Arteris IP and Magillem share a common customer-centric ethos focused on helping our users accelerate chip development with world class SoC development software and IP. Our team is excited to join Arteris IP in pursuing this common vision.”

“Arteris IP and Magillem share a passion for helping our customers create the world’s most sophisticated systems-on-chip with state-of-the-art technology that shortens design schedules and increases profit margins, so we are delighted to welcome the Magillem team into Arteris IP,” said K. Charles Janac, President and CEO of Arteris IP. “As we integrate our technologies to accelerate and simplify the SoC assembly design flow, we will enhance innovation in both SoC IP integration software and the highly configurable on-chip interconnect IP that implements chip architectures.”

The proposed transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to take place during the fourth quarter of 2020.

Stay tuned as we continue to highlight these innovative companies. In the meantime, see how Jama Connect helps realign remote teams for remote work with minimal disruption.

SEE THE INFOGRAPHIC

Founded in 1999 as a spin-off of Siemens AG, German semiconductor manufacturer, Infineon Technologies AG is a world leader in semiconductor solutions that make life easier, safer, and greener. Ranking among the top 10% most sustainable companies in the world, Infineon is a leading player in automotive, digital security systems, power and sensor systems, and industrial power control.

In the 2020 fiscal year, the company, based in Neubiberg, Germany, reported sales of around €10 billion with about 47,400 total employees worldwide.

Infineon is dedicated to delivering zero defects regarding committed functionality, reliability, time, volume and cost, and has pledged to achieve CO2 neutrality by 2030. Semiconductor and system solutions from Infineon make our world easier, safer and greener – with technology that achieves more, consumes less, and is accessible to everyone.

In this customer story, we examine how Jama Software helps Infineon manage complex product development subject to regulatory compliance and increase efficiency. This blog post is an abbreviated version of the customer story. Read the full story to find out how Infineon’s shift from a document-based approach to a more modern requirements management solution resulted in better management of complex product development, systemic handling of requirements, improved collaboration, and more efficient functional safety standard compliance.

Top Challenges Infineon Experienced with Complex Product Development

Infineon’s product portfolio scales from single-transistor products to the most complex system-on-chips involving several globally dispersed teams who author, read, and interact with thousands of requirement items across several hierarchies.

The top challenges the organization faced included:

Keeping the overview on ever-increasing product complexities and avoid requirements misunderstandings
Providing compliance without compromising time-to-market goals
Manual document versioning makes review cycles and alignment difficult
Improving the review & sign-off process, making it an integral part of the requirement management system
Need for enhanced reuse capabilities
Exchanging requirements information with customers and suppliers
Overcoming the scaling limits of a document-centric approach

Seeking a Modern Solution to Enable Efficient Requirement Management

Infineon was looking to transition from a document-centric approach to a modern, database-centric requirements management solution.

By deploying Jama Connect, Infineon product development teams have adopted a more efficient working style to manage complexity, increase collaboration across teams, and improve transparency.

Jama Connect helped Infineon shift from a document-based approach to a more modern requirements management solution enabling newfound product development efficiencies around complexities, communication, reviews, and compliance.

The complex products that Infineon teams build require large amounts of data to be used from a central source, by teams distributed over different locations. With Jama Connect, Infineon is also able to collaborate with teams outside their organization and exchange requirements to ensure functional safety standards are met throughout the product development lifecycle.

“By using Jama to manage our requirements-related information over the product development cycle, our R&D engineers increase their daily efficiency and simultaneously contribute to the current digital transformation. Jama’s good usability won over our development teams.” Pierre Nury Technical Lead Requirements Management Methodologies

To learn more about Infineon’s shift from a document-based approach to a more modern requirements management solution, download the full customer story now!

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Over the last two years, the semiconductor industry has seen an unprecedented wave of consolidations and M&A activity – deals worth $85B in 2015 and a whopping $115B in 2016! As a result of all of this consolidation, semiconductor companies are finding themselves having to integrate diverse teams, technologies and IP on an ongoing basis.

This consolidation is driven at least in part by the exponential rise in the cost of building chips at the newest nodes (16nm, 14nm, 10nm…). Semiconductor companies are trying to leverage their existing IP^[1] – and the IP acquired through M&A – into more designs to control this rising cost. This leads to a greater emphasis on IP reuse than ever before.

In order to be successful in this new world order, many teams are beginning to adopt industry standard best-practices for managing their projects. One of the key components for the successful management of a distributed, complex and time-critical SoC (System on Chip) project is Requirements Management (RM). Having a full set of requirements, easily accessible and constantly updated for the project makes it much easier to bring transparency and tracking to the SoC.

Once requirements management is in place, it is also essential to be able to tie requirements back to the context of the IPs being used in the SoC. Since IP management and requirements management are two separate systems, being able to connect these two is critical.

Implementing a requirements management system like Jama with an IP Management system like ProjectIC allows fully traceable hierarchical SoC development during the IP Lifecycle Management process and closes the loop between system design requirements and IP implementation details. This represents one more step forward to reaching the important goal of implementing IP reuse strategies that reduce development costs, improve time-to-market, and keep semiconductor companies profitable in today’s highly competitive SOC marketplace.

To download Vishal’s whitepaper on this topic here.

^[1] IP: In this context, IP or Intellectual Property is a self contained design block that can potentially be used in multiple projects.

When I joined Jama as CEO earlier this year, I was excited to become part of a team that was passionate about our customers and solving their problems. The companies we get to work with are a major reason I wanted to join Jama to begin with — it’s an honor and a thrill to partner with them as they build products that will change their industries and the economy. I know I’m not alone in that enthusiasm: As I met individually with every employee during my first three months on the job, over and over again “our customers” was a top reason people cited for coming to work here.

Our customers span an array of critical industries — aerospace, financial and consulting services, medical devices, government, semiconductor, consumer electronics and automotive, to name a few. I’ve now had the privilege of meeting with dozens of them, and I’ve consistently heard them describe the following market forces in play:

The new generation of smart, connected products is increasing competition.

For the first time ever, when consumers buy something new, whether a phone, a thermostat or a car, they expect its capabilities to improve over time. They expect new features over the lifetime of the product, automatic fixes where there were previously recalls, and unprecedented options for customization. With each release of Jama, we’re rolling out new features and improvements that focus on enabling innovation for our customers. We invested in building our REST API to add more even customization and extend the functionality of our solution.

Increasing complexity and new regulation add new challenges.

Development cycles are more complicated than before, requiring close coordination of hardware and software teams, often using different tools and methodologies. Connected products introduce new security risks, often into industries that were previously immune to regulatory compliance. As software becomes an increasingly critical component of new cars, the automotive industry has responded with new compliance regulations such as ISO26262, and so have we. This year we achieved ISO 26262 fit-for-purpose certification by TÜV SÜD to give our customers confidence as they navigate the path to compliance in their product development process.

Systems development teams require a purpose-built product development platform and must take a continuous engineering approach to create products for the modern world.

ALM was built for software, PLM was built for hardware, but today’s product teams require a unified set of capabilities. Teams need contextual, ongoing collaboration and a single source of truth for their data and requirements. In June, we released Jama 8, kicking off a series of releases that will build on our core traceability and collaboration features. We’re also investing in our product ecosystem with the launch of our Partner Alliance Program, working with best-of-breed solution providers to better serve our customers.

At face value, these challenges are daunting. But we get to see our customers overcome them each day through disciplined, modern management of their development processes, which lets them better capitalize on industry trends. As they work to deliver the life- and economy-critical products that are going to change the way we live, we’re glad to be their partners and are eager to foster their success every step of the way.