The business and financial leadership of the largest division at a major semiconductor company wanted to optimize their billion-dollar-plus annual investment in New Product Development (NPD) activities. The division’s development cycles are inherently long and costly, as products are complex and demands for accuracy are extremely high across definition, development, and manufacturing. Meanwhile, these functions span multiple domains of expertise and, typically, multiple teams and sites. Further, fresh IP is critical to product functionality and inter-operability/adherence to standards, so even “simple” products are likely to require a combination of state-of-the-art IP from both internal and external providers.

There are a host of tradeoffs that have to be made—not only to develop a superior product, but also to get it to market quickly—and at an affordable price. These include:

• Which features to include in an environment where additional functionality adds significant value but comes at the expense of longer time to market and higher unit cost;
• How to optimize “performance” given that speed, power consumption, form factor, and price are all critical customer requirements; and
• Deciding how many, and which, product variations to offer when additional SKUs can allow significant tuning of products to distinct market segments but come at a high cost in both NPD and operations complexity.