Semiconductor development in Ireland: reducing 'development stress' caused by digital hardware and embedded software team interaction

Today's consumer electronic products are complex, multi-discipline systems, far beyond just physical gates on a semiconductor chip. Their development involves a delicate mix of engineering disciplines and technologies such as analog hardware, digital hardware, software, board design, semiconductor physics and chemical engineering. The research presented in this dissertation examines the specific relationship between the integration of digital hardware and software development activities and the successful creation of modern consumer electronics devices and embedded computing platforms, to determine which aspects of inter-discipline development caused the most difficulty to a semiconductor device for the consumer electronics market as it progressed in life-cycle through from design to tape-out/mass production. As of 2010, Semiconductor Fabrication techniques continue to (broadly) follow Gordon Moore’s Law (Moore, 1965), which states that the number of transistors on a chip doubles approximately every 18 months. In addition, incremental improvements in fabrication techniques have resulted in successively smaller chip geometries—greater functionality requiring less silicon area and consuming lower power than the previous generation. Embedded computing devices are omnipresent in consumer electronics in modern society. Consumer desire and expectations of product improvement has lead to rampant innovation in the consumer electronics market, with terrific pressures to be first to market with a new innovative feature or design. Along with this increase in capability comes an unfortunate but necessary increase in complexity. Consequently, the semiconductor devices (Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), System-on-Chip (SoC), System-in-Package (SiP), modules) that power consumer electronic products require significant resource investments in both hardware and software design, implementation and test—investments that are increasing in direct relationship with the device complexity. The research presented in this thesis is a grounded theory which shows various categories of interactions that occur between Irish digital hardware and software development teams who work together in Small to Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) organisations on such product. The contribution of this research is in six parts: (a) it identifies that digital IC hardware engineering is very similar in many respects to software engineering; (b) it illustrates that the business models that survive in the ecosystem rely on engineering that is sufficient to meet market needs; (c) it shows that the social and geographical degrees of separation play a more significant role in adversely affecting and impeding performance than technical or techno-cultural issues between the two groups; (d) it acknowledges that there is a growing separation of technical mindset between software and digital IC hardware; (e) it provides strong evidence for the applicability of Agile methods in the development of consumer electronics SoC devices; (f) it presents a list of patterns of organisation and workflow for semiconductor projects that may help in the development process. Comparison against existing literature was used to validate the results. Scope for potential future work in the area of digital hardware and software team interaction is also presented and discussed.