Semiconductor IP Quality Management And Metrics: Perspective From Software Engineering

The word "engineering" refers to the disciplined application of scientific knowledge to resolve conflicting constraints and requirements for problems of technology. Although the breakthroughs in science domain bring engineering technology to a high level, technology can not be applied successfully to resolve the complex problem without direction of engineering discipline. Software engineering is a typical example which changes the software industy from a cottage industry to a modern industry. Engineering has played an important role in modern industry. However, as a basic technology domain of information industry and the neighbor discipline of software industry, there has still no independent engineering in Integrated Circuit(IC) industry.The development speed of IC manufacture technology is faster than any other technology domain, which brings sustained pressure to IC design productivity. Peoples pay a lot of effort to improve the IC design productivity in half a century, the typical methods including Electronic Design Automation, Design Methodology, and Hardware Description Language. The dissertation argues that the technology method is only a part factor for improving the design productivity, systematic engineering research is the critical key issue for IC design industry, and successful experiences of software engineering can use for reference in IC design domain.In the dissertation, we use the software process and quality metrics methodology as a reference, the model and methods in these software research domains are applied into the semiconductor IP design and qualification flow. The main work and achievements are as follows:1. The design productivity gap in IC industry is researched from engineering management view. The technology transferring pattern between software engineering and IC design domain is proposed. A research methodology for IC engineering is proposed from engineering management.2. Semiconductor IP quality management process and related methods are researched in this dissertation in the IC engineering framework. A two-level definition for IP quality is proposed. An IP quality management system including five quality activities is proposed based on software measurement theory and metric models. The quality management system can be used to control and improve IP quality. The related researches are classified into five quality activities.3. An FCQM quality model for IP is proposed based on software quality model structure. The model can be used for IP quality standard definition. In order to applying the quality model into the quality certification activity, a mapping method which convert FCQM model to a relational database model is introduced, and a web-based IP quality certification system is proposed and implemented in "National Integrated Circuit Public Service Platform". 4. Based on the research of component based software engineering and COTS software component qualification; we proposed a "black-box" qualification framework for semiconductor IP. A framework based on IP deliverables for "Greater China Semiconductor IP Trader" project is implemented. The deliverable checklist is the main form of the framework. An IP data analysis flow based AHP method is proposed for COST IP. As a case study, three SPI IP cores are selected and the results of AHP qualification show the new method is more accuracy and efficient than the WSM method used in QIP metric.5. A suite of metrics for IP design quality is defined, and design quality control strategy method is proposed for IP design flow. A standard data description format for IP quality metric is proposed in the dissertation. The format is built using XML schema technology. An automated measurement framework is proposed within traditional ASIC design flow and EDA tools. As a case study, the presented quality measure framework has been implemented using script technology.6. The dissertation proposes a quality improvement process based on software refactoring methods and design pattern. A suite of basic refactoring for VHDL is defined, these hardware code refactoring is used in a viterbi decoder of UWB communication system.