Do a better job of forecasting engineering-platform needs....
Poor forecasting of EDA tools, EDA hardware and engineering compute, results in multi-$M decisions being made at risk
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Technical debt leading to low return on human capital
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Increased time to revenue
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Quality impact on reputation
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Engineering team morale
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Negative impact on efficiency and effectiveness
Forecast Manager™ - capacity planning and rapid turnaround forecasting tool for deploying efficient engineering platforms.
The forecasting problem
Good resource forecasting is critical to achieving predictable verification for modern hardware semiconductor development projects and programs.
Such projects can consume vast amounts of computer hardware & infrastructure plus EDA design and verification tool license resources.
Good forecasting allows engineering teams to plan and provision resources so that projects deliver on schedule, and meet quality targets, within expected costs.
However, forecasting can be time consuming and hard to do well, and if the forecasts turn out to be mostly inaccurate, then the benefits to effort ratio is low.
Too often, teams use spreadsheets driven by incomplete data, where re-spins take ages to be generated, often creating spurious results nobody can quite believe.

Analytics Solutions
Forecast Manager's main screen gives access to Project Manager so users can select the projects they need to generate scenarios for.
The Main Table contains all project details, including run times for hardware or tools running tests, and hardware characterisation information. Show Chart allows users to pop-out charts for specific projects, then dynamically change views by clicking in the key legend.
Main Chart is the visualisation of all projects chosen by the user and features a pop-out capability to allow for generation and visualisation of mutliple scenarios for visual comparison purposes.
The Console gives real-time information about extraction and loading of data by Forecast Manager.


Silicon Insights approach to forecasting
FORECAST Manager significantly improves the quality of verification platform forecasts by applying a programmatic approach to forecasting, giving more plausible results than traditional guess work or spreadsheet-based forecasting.
FORECAST Manager is a forecast scenario generation tool which generates highly plausible resource consumption forecasts for semiconductor hardware designs (hardware IP and system level), even when limited actual usage data is available.
Forecast Manager models scenarios using bias files containing sets of input parameters and weighting values used to build bottom-up layered forecasts, phase by phase, layer by layer and method by method.
Each forecast layer is generated as a parameterised normal distribution curve where the user can model realistic usage curves normally seen in actual data where consumption tends to ramp and decline with multiple peaks at different stages in the product development lifecycle.
Process and governance
Forecast Manager has a built-in workflow capability allowing users to promote favourite scenarios for further investigation. These can then be approved, rjected or saved. Each is given a unique id so it easily identified for future consultation.



Planning
Add project milestones to the forecast scenario to generate more plausible views that align with engineering resource planning.

Forecast capacity shortfalls
Generate a current capacity graph overlaid on forecasted requirements to illustrate when a capacity crunch is likely to hit - a "do nothing" scenario. This demonstrates the size of capacity shortfall, so the user can generate proposed scenarios to hypothesise what extra resource investment is required over the forecast period. Balance investment against timescales and acceptable quality of product.

If you would like to learn more...
Silicon Insights have written a paper "Plausible Forecasting". If you would like to download a copy, fill in the form with your details.
