Why Virtual Operations is Important

In Early Stage companies the focus is on Time To Market, Engineering, Marketing, Funding.
    - Manufacturing and Operations are generally Not a priority
    - Some of the early engineering decisions have long term impact as one tries to ramp up production
    - Many Operational considerations that impact Time-To-Volume and Time-To-Revenue (REAL investor 'care-abouts') are not considered early

Some Industry Facts/Problems

Over 80% of Design schedules are missed!
Over 30% of Time-To-Market for Prototypes is in pos-GDS activities
Over 50% of Time-To-Market for Production is in pos-GDS activities
Over 50% of designs need at least one SPIN

Cost of mask sets is escalating very rapidly [$250K for 0.18um CMOS, $600K for 0.13um and over $1M for 90nm]

The dis-aggregated COT supply chain has many GAPS
    - Many alternatives - Fabless ASIC, Do-it-yourself COT, Outsourced COT,...
    - Many suppliers - IP, Libraries, Memory, Fab, Packaging, Test,...
    - Many negotiations, selection, relationships

The Operations Dilemma

Hiring a full time Operations
    - too Early can be Expensive!
    - too Late can be Catastrophic for delivering unit volumes and revenue

The TCX Approach

We have developed a systematic methodology to account for some of these operations issues.  This is based on a concurrent engineering approach which is one important aspect of  "glue-ware" in the IC development and implementation process.  Operations tasks are organized into four phases of the IC life cycle - Global Planning, Design Support and Operations Planning, Prototyping and Production Execution as shown in the figure.  This approach offers an opportunity to cost effectively manage the Operations Dilemma by selectively leveraging experienced industry resources.

Details of the TCX approach are discussed in two white papers .

TCX offers Services in all four phase of the IC Development Cycle