Industries

How do semiconductor companies find success with innovation?

By Maria Mosto

Trends behind the smart device revolution

Adapting to a changing and complex market is tough. It’s useful to know what strategies your industry peers employ to meet today’s semiconductor industry’s challenges.

The new research report “Retool Semiconductor Innovation for Profit” is based on independent survey results that include responses from more than 250 semiconductor companies, including IDMs, fabless, foundries, OSATs, subcons, photonics companies, intellectual property (IP) providers.

The report identifies how effectively companies are leveraging innovation and technology to manage the business challenges and complexity they see in the industry today, like new production methods, changing business models, anticipating market trends, responding to market changes, and product and supply chain complexity.

Engineers only spend 50% of their time designing!

Based on this research, it’s a fact that technical resources such as engineers and designers typically spend less than half of their time directly on product innovation, product development, and engineering.

Adapting to changing and complex markets is challenging. So, it’s also helpful to know what strategies your industry peers are employing to meet today’s semiconductor industry’s operational challenges, such as:

  • Understanding the impact of design changes across disciplines
  • Delays in manufacturing waiting for design data
  • Inefficiency from recreating not reusing design data
  • Simulating and optimizing product behavior or performance

While it’s clear the answers lie in further innovation, the question is where and how?

Leading semiconductor companies find success with innovation

The report identifies top performers in the industry with better revenue growth, profit margin expansion, and sales from new products. These top performers show a path forward. It’s helpful to see how your peers address some of these challenges and how leaders are succeeding.

The report also demonstrates how effectively companies use innovation and technology, solutions, and software to manage the business challenges and complexity they see in the industry today. It identifies two of many key differences between top performers and others:

  • Top performers are more than 5X more likely to be significantly above average at designing successful innovative products
  • They are also more than 4X more likely to be excellent at design and process collaboration across their ecosystem

While many companies are finding success with innovation, there are gaps for others, and it’s clear from the report that there are both challenges and opportunities that remain top of mind for all. 

Download the report to learn more.

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This article first appeared on the Siemens Digital Industries Software blog at https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/electronics-semiconductors/2021/04/28/semiconductor-lifecycle-innovation/