Win IC DesignsPrinciples of Field Applications and Sales Engineering

Introducing the book,

Many books have been written about IC design, but no book has been written about the before and the after IC design; namely, how to determine what ICs to design in the first place and subsequently how to design these ICs into systems. These before and after activities are mainly field applications and sales engineering functions.

This book combines two decades of author’s diverse experience in the IC industry. The purpose of the book is to make field applications and sales engineers more successful by formulating a winning methodology for the practice of their profession.

Purpose of the Book

Chapters

1. The role of the field applications and sales engineer

2. The six stages of the design-win

3. Determining the IC requirements of an application

4. Win ASIC designs

5. Win memory designs

6. Win microcontroller and microprocessor designs

7. How to use quality and reliability engineering to win designs

8. Price negotiation

9. Supporting distributors and representatives

10. Making customer visits more effective

Hierarchical Information

The following 3 slides show examples of information for each level…

opportunity identified

TO

DO

TO

PR

OV

IDE

Establish FAE, Rep, & PME team

Identify customer decision makers and email invitation

Email promotional agenda

Sales makes corporate presentation

FAE makes engineering presentation

Show samples & starter kits

Get commitment for follow up visit for a firm reason. E.g., demo tools

MCU/MPU selection guide

PowerPoint Presentations

General product catalogue (non-MCU products customer could use in this or other applications)

1st visit 2nd visit 3rd visit

FAE writes engineering customer visit report

Rep writes business visit report & provides pricing info.

Email “thank you” & list of action items

Set up internal meeting to establish strategy & assign action items

FAE creates comparison table vs. Competitions

Additional literature w/more detail

More promotional info such as press release & articles to keep visibility high

Email promotional agenda

FAE demos tools

Bring high-level people if sticky business or technical issues

Discuss software development issues

Offer MCU training

Tools & tools documentation

Evaluation kit

Comparison table & benchmarks generated by CAE (Central Application Eng.)

Application notes

More MPU promotional material. E.g., info on existing systems using same processor

FAE & rep write visit report & raise red flags

Marketing & CAE write business & engineering proposal

Update & adapt design–win strategy

Invite corporate executives if needed

More promotional items. E.g., gifts w/ corporate logo

Component engineering information. I.e., die & packaging photo & info

Implement vertical sales by having high-level people from both sides

General engineering & business proposal

vendor selection

FAE & rep to be present for any questions or concerns when vendor selection is being made

Have

NDA signed Q/A

Submit microcontroller support proposal

Take customer to lunch & get info on competition & further understand motivating factors

Email promotional agenda

Confirm final decision date

Get commitment that you will have the last look

between visits

Microcontroller Design-Win Management First Level Information

Specific engineering & business proposal

Offer tools training

Microcontroller Support Proposal

Second Level Information

Inform your prospects that if they would like the proposed microcontroller/microprocessor benchmarked, you would provide this service to them.  The benchmark could be for large parts of the customer’s code or for a critical part of their code that needs to be processed within a specific time.  The code could be in either C (or any high level language) or assembly.  If in C, customer can also evaluate the C compiler’s efficiency.  (C compiler efficiency is the size of the assembly code the compiler generates compared to the size of the assembly code if it was hand-written by an expert assembly language programmer).

If the customer’s application is highly interrupt driven, you could also benchmark multiple interrupts, nested or not nested, from various sources, to benchmark interrupt latency times.

It is said that there are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks.  In order for the benchmarks to be credible and meaningful, your company should ideally belong to a third party consortium that does independent, objective, and unbiased benchmarking. One such organization is The Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium* (eembc.org). EEMBC’s benchmarks are for commonly used algorithms in consumer, automotive, and networking applications.

If there are benchmarks you can provide to your customer that were performed by EEMBC, provide it.

(*Similar independent benchmarking organizations exist for ASICs. Instead of running code, they design circuits using libraries from various ASIC suppliers and benchmark / simulate the speed and power consumption of these circuits.)

Third Level Information

Code Benchmarking

16 entities FAEs interact with

15 ways to find design-win opportunities

6 stages of the design-win and how to execute each

5 ways to use quality and reliability engineering to win designs

12 types of IC prices

16 ways to obtain a lower price from IC marketing

5 ways to convince a customer to accept a higher price

Examples of Types of Information

Background

IC test engineer, FAE, PME

IC Types

MCU/MPU, ASIC, Memory

Companies

Hitachi, Xerox, Siemens, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, NEC

Sasan has written about ICs in Electronic News and NASA Tech Briefs. Sasan used to write software to test hardware. He wrote this book the way software is written; namely, structured and orderly, thus easy to read and follow.

Writer

Sasan Khajavi gained his IC engineering and business experience working for a systems company. He was an IC test and qualification engineer at Xerox where he selected and qualified ICs and IC vendors. Being on the other side of the fence, he learned firsthand how system companies make complex IC and IC vendor selection decisions, and created criteria and strategy for making these decisions.

Thank You

Buy / More Information

© 2012 winicdesigns.com

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