Real time electronic design automation (EDA) scheduling system in IC design industry

Abstract

Because of the global competition and short life cycle in semiconductor industry, the IC design companies try to keep their competitiveness. Besides the human resources and advanced technology, enhancing the speed of the development is important for market share and time to market. IC designers usually use electronic design automation tool to shorten and verify the development. However, the EDA tools and servers are expensive and limited. Hence, it becomes a critical problem to allocate the resources and schedule the jobs. This study aims to develop the decision support system framework for IC design job scheduling. The framework enhances the throughput and reduces waiting time. In practice, this study implements the proposed framework in an IC design service company in Taiwan as the empirical study. The empirical study reduced 77.4% of waiting time and 60% of makespan.