Why Modernizing Product Development Processes Matter as Semiconductor Complexity Grows
Inside This Article
Every member of the semiconductor ecosystem recognizes that complexity is increasing within the industry—from advanced packaging and supply chain dependencies to rapid design iterations and regulatory requirements. Arena by PTC is fast becoming the solution that helps semiconductor manufacturers control complex product development processes beyond simply managing product data.
What’s Driving Product Complexity?
As companies develop more advanced chips that deliver greater functionality, higher performance, and lower power consumption, getting to market faster has become imperative. Growth in AI, automotive electronics, high-performance computing, 5G, and IoT is driving demand for increasingly sophisticated devices that pack more features into smaller form factors. Meanwhile, global supply chains, evolving regulatory requirements, and distributed engineering teams make managing product data, design changes, quality, and collaboration across the product lifecycle more challenging.
Semiconductor product complexity is growing because innovation now depends on:
- Coordinating increasingly sophisticated chip designs
- Larger volumes of product information
- Faster development cycles
- Higher transistor densities
- More process steps
- Software integration
- Specialized machinery
Concurrently, companies must meet stricter quality, regulatory, and customer requirements while contending with shorter product lifecycles. Chips currently being produced must support higher transistor densities, greater power efficiency, faster memory bandwidth, and more sophisticated thermal management.
Cloud-Native PLM Helps Manage Product Development Complexity Across the Product Lifecycle
Recent Tech-Clarity research found that more than 60% of semiconductor companies use six or more disconnected systems to manage product information and processes.1 Additionally, Lifecycle Insights reports that 59% of engineering organizations report that product complexity is increasing.2
Together, these trends highlight a growing challenge: semiconductor companies are developing increasingly complex products while relying on disconnected systems that hinder visibility, slow engineering changes, and impede collaboration across the product lifecycle.
To help manage increasingly complex semiconductor information ecosystems, manufacturers are adopting cloud-native product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions that connect product data, processes, and teams across the product lifecycle.
Why Is Cloud-Native PLM Becoming More Critical to Semiconductor Product Development?
Cloud-native PLM has significantly reduced deployment costs and implementation complexity compared with legacy PLM systems, making enterprise-grade lifecycle management accessible to organizations beyond the largest manufacturers. By eliminating much of the infrastructure, maintenance, and upgrade burden of traditional on-premises systems, cloud-native PLM enables companies of all sizes, including many fabless semiconductor firms, to adopt modern lifecycle management more quickly.3
As a strategic platform, PLM unifies engineering information and streamlines change management. It also improves cross-functional collaboration and provides a single source of product truth, especially as semiconductor intellectual property (IP) reuse, traceability, and digital engineering have expanded.
Managing Eval Boards With PLM
Semiconductor companies must design and build electronic boards called evaluation boards (eval boards) that are revision-controlled and tested but never sold. These boards are critical for silicon validation, characterization, customer evaluation, manufacturing test, reliability testing, and marketing. They’re also a major challenge because companies struggle with high hardware costs, tracking inventory across global teams, and outdated software or missing components.
PLM solutions manage eval boards by centralizing the complete bill of materials (BOMs), tracking printed circuit board (PCB) hardware revisions, and linking physical evaluation kits directly to the specific integrated circuits (ICs) and firmware they validate.
How Does Centralized Product Information Help Improve Semiconductor Operations?
Centralizing product information creates a single source of truth, providing semiconductor organizations with a trusted, up-to-date record for every product throughout its lifecycle. Rather than relying on disconnected spreadsheets, emails, and siloed systems, teams can quickly access the information they need to make confident decisions, manage changes, and keep work moving.
Engineering, quality, manufacturing, sourcing, and supply chain teams rely on a single source of truth for product information, documentation, BOMs, specifications, and change records. This improves cross-functional collaboration, reduces errors from outdated information, accelerates engineering change processes, strengthens traceability and regulatory compliance, and enables faster, more informed decisions. As product complexity continues to rise, a single source of truth helps ensure every team is aligned, reducing risk while improving operational efficiency and product quality.
Secure and Streamlined Collaboration Across the Company
A single source of truth ensures every team works from the same up-to-date information, improving collaboration, accelerating change management, and reducing risk across the product lifecycle, resulting in smoother operations overall. It also ensures that every product record, revision, and change is managed in one trusted location. This helps organizations work with the latest information while eliminating duplicate files, reducing engineering confusion, and supporting traceability.
Regardless of location, engineering, operations, procurement, and quality teams, as well as suppliers, including foundries and outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT), can access the same information, enabling real-time visibility.
How Does PLM Help Improve Change Management and Reduce Complexity Across the Semiconductor Product Lifecycle?
Engineering changes are a constant part of semiconductor product development. Design revisions may be required to address silicon respins, yield improvements, component obsolescence, supplier changes, and regulatory updates.
Managing the Ripple Effects of Semiconductor Engineering Changes
Unlike many industries where a change may affect only a single product, semiconductor companies often manage interconnected designs spanning packaging, reference designs, test programs, manufacturing documentation, firmware, and supplier components. A single engineering change can ripple across multiple teams and partners. PLM helps control those changes through structured processes, centralized information, and traceability.
How Does PLM Streamline Engineering Changes?
A cloud-native PLM solution formalizes engineering change management by handling engineering change requests (ECRs) and engineering change orders (ECOs) through standardized, automated workflows. Rather than relying on spreadsheets or email threads, every proposed change undergoes a documented review and approval process, providing greater visibility, consistency, and traceability across engineering teams.
Improvements include:
- Standardized review and approval processes
- Clearly defined stakeholder responsibilities
- Reduced manual coordination across teams
- Faster implementation of approved engineering changes
Improves Change Impact Analysis
A major challenge in engineering is understanding the impact of a change. PLM maintains relationships among product information, enabling engineers to quickly determine which products use a component, which assemblies are affected, which documentation must be updated, which suppliers need to be notified, and which manufacturing processes require revision.
Maintains Complete Revision History
Every product revision is automatically recorded, creating a complete, traceable history of design changes. Engineers can easily compare previous revisions, approval records, supporting documentation, and see who made each change and why it occurred. Access to complete product information is especially valuable during audits, customer inquiries, or failure analysis.
Enhances Cross-Functional Collaboration
Engineering changes rarely involve engineering alone. PLM enables engineering to collaborate more effectively with quality teams, the supply chain, procurement, program management, and external manufacturing partners. Rather than manually distributing updated files, stakeholders access controlled product information in the PLM system.
How Can PLM Shorten Product Development Without Sacrificing Traceability?
PLM streamlines new product introduction (NPI) by enabling engineering teams to release designs more efficiently, coordinate design reviews, manage prototype revisions, and synchronize documentation with development and manufacturing. A connected product development process shortens the time from design completion to production readiness.
Semiconductor companies often need to comply with customer, industry, and regulatory requirements. PLM provides traceability for design decisions, validation results, verification records, change approvals, material declarations, and supplier documentation. End-to-end traceability helps engineers demonstrate compliance throughout the product lifecycle.
Why Is Connecting Product Development With Quality Processes Important for Semiconductor Manufacturers?
For semiconductor manufacturers, integrating product development with quality shifts quality from a downstream inspection activity to a continuous process embedded across the product lifecycle. By unifying engineering changes, design controls, supplier quality, compliance, and corrective actions around a single source of product information, companies can reduce risk, improve product quality, accelerate development, and bring innovative chips to market with greater confidence.
Arena PLM and quality management system (QMS) solutions integrate essential quality processes across the product lifecycle, including corrective and preventive actions (CAPAs), nonconformances, audits, supplier quality, and complaints. This enables quality teams to link quality events directly to parts, BOMs, changes, and documentation.
How Does Arena PLM Help Semiconductor Companies Scale for Future Growth?
Arena PLM provides semiconductor organizations with a scalable, cloud-native foundation for managing product data, engineering changes, quality processes, and supplier collaboration within a single, connected system. As product lines expand, teams can standardize processes, improve visibility, and ensure that everyone works from current, approved information.
Scaling Complex Product Development With Arena
By centralizing parts, BOMs, specifications, documents, supplier records, and change history, Arena makes complex product development more repeatable and manageable. As demand grows, Arena helps companies support more products, changes, suppliers, and regulatory requirements while maintaining quality and traceability, enabling faster innovation and bringing advanced products to market with greater confidence.
Simplify Complexity to Accelerate Innovation
As semiconductor products become more sophisticated, managing product information, engineering changes, quality, and collaboration across disconnected systems grows increasingly difficult. A cloud-native PLM solution provides a connected foundation that streamlines development, strengthens traceability, and improves decision-making. By bringing people, processes, and product information together, Arena helps semiconductor companies reduce complexity, accelerate innovation, and scale with confidence as market demands continue to evolve.
See for yourself how Arena can help your organization manage product complexity.
Sources
- The quote is attributed to Tech-Clarity in their report “Retool Semiconductor Innovation for Profit – A Lifecycle Approach for Smart Products and Devices” – https://tech-clarity.com/semiconductor-growth/23350
- As reported by Lifecycle Insights https://www.lifecycleinsights.com
- https://www.ptc.com/en/technologies/plm/plm-cloud
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is semiconductor product development becoming more complex?
Semiconductor product complexity is rising due to demand for smaller, faster, and more powerful devices across markets such as AI, automotive, high-performance computing, 5G, and IoT. Companies must manage increasingly sophisticated chip architectures, higher transistor densities, larger volumes of engineering data, software integration, specialized manufacturing processes, and stricter quality and regulatory requirements. These factors drive more design iterations, more dependencies, and greater challenges in coordinating product information across global teams.
Why are disconnected systems a challenge for semiconductor companies?
Disconnected systems make it difficult for engineering, quality, manufacturing, sourcing, and supply chain teams to access accurate, up-to-date product information. When teams rely on separate tools, spreadsheets, emails, and manual processes, companies face increased risks of outdated data, communication gaps, longer engineering change cycles, and costly errors. A centralized PLM system provides a single source of truth, enabling teams to collaborate with consistent product information, revisions, BOMs, and change records.
How does PLM help semiconductor companies manage engineering changes and improve product quality?
PLM helps semiconductor companies manage engineering changes by integrating product information, workflows, approvals, and quality processes throughout the product lifecycle. Engineers can quickly assess a change’s impact across components, assemblies, documentation, suppliers, and manufacturing processes. By maintaining complete revision histories and linking quality events to product data, PLM improves traceability, accelerates root-cause analysis, reduces risk, and helps companies bring higher-quality products to market more quickly.
Joseph Prock