Design as an NRE cost For any semiconductor product, design is part of the nonrecurring engineering (NRE) cost—the fixed cost of development and production. As the semiconductor industry approaches the 100-nm technology node, manufacturing NRE (mask set and probe card) costs are nearing $1 million for a large IC. With an average of just 500 wafers produced from each mask set, rapid growth of manufacturing NRE can throttle the initiation of new IC design projects. However, design NRE costs, which routinely reach tens of millions of dollars, dwarf manufacturing NRE costs. Indeed, according to the 2001 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (http://public.itrs.net), “Cost of design is the greatest challenge to continuation of the semiconductor roadmap.” Consider two factors that contribute to design cost. First, according to a model developed by Dataquest for the 2001 ITRS, the design cost per unit time per designer consists of $326,070 ($181,568 in 1990, increasing by 5% per year for the past 12 years) for the designer’s annual salary and overhead, plus $157,159 ($99,301 in 1990, increasing by 3.9% per year) for annual tool costs per designer. This estimate ignores the costs of CAD integration and support, which are often several times the tool costs. Second, the number of designer months (number of designers times total time) in a design project is increasing rapidly. The wellknown design productivity gap between growth in designer productivity (number of transistors per designer month) and growth in number of available transistors on a given-size chip—originally estimated by Sematech in 1994 to be increasing at 37% per year—is still growing today. Assuming a team of 20 designers can reliably complete a multimillion-gate design in one year, the design NRE cost is still nearly $10 million.