The Story Of Zeus

Introduction to Semiconductor Industry

The Semiconductor industry is the collection of companies engaged in the design and fabrication of semiconductors and semiconductor devices such as transistors and integrated circuits. Our story revolves around a group of engineers who deal with testing the performance of these semiconductor devices before these get release to the market. These engineers deal with tonnes and tonnes of data and try to make sense of it in a short amount of time. The mission for these engineers and the team they belong to is to hit the market as soon as possible. In that regard these teams want to make their process more efficient and very productive.

Once upon a time

The breeze from the window brushes past the curtains on a cold Monday morning. Roshan receives a phone call from his boss. “We need you to be the lead designer in our next project. We have named it Zeus. Lets get started on it tomorrow” says the boss and hands him down a small document with details of the project. The document was tilted “Data Management in Semiconductor industry”. Roshan spends the night going through the document and undertands that semiconductor is a vast ocean. In order to understand the nuances of the industry, Roshan and his team come up with a customized design process. His approach was largely inspired by the doube diamond design process with a few tweaks based on the scope of customer exposure and timeline. Below is an image from Roshan’s notes depicting his thought process

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The process

Meet the Heroes

Having devised the design process, Roshan started meeting with the customers. His customers were kind enough to agree to answer his questions over chat and quickly Roshan was able to create personas. He called them Heroes. He was able to understand them and their challenges. He noted them down in a his Journal. Below is the excerpt from his Journal.

How do they do it now ?

Roshan was a firm believer of learning from the past. To move forward he understood he should learn the present and the past. He analyzed all his conversations with different customers and came up with the state of play on how data flows currently inside the organisation.

Pain Points

Hell bent on narrowing down the challenges facing the heroes, Roshan spent the couple of nights asking himself - “Where should I start ? What are the three most important challenges faced by my heroes?”. The following is Roshan’s assessment of the 3 most important challenges facing his heroes currently.

Observations

“What about the solutions?” asked Roshan’s boss. Roshan and his team kept patience. Roshan brought together the team and help brainstorming sessions to nail down on the key opportunities that not only solves the current pain points but also could be scaled further to give a seamless experience to the heroes. Below is from Roshan’s journal depicting his three top opportunities.

Information Architecture

Low-fidelity Wireframes

Hi-fidelity Mockups

Predicted Impact

1. 90 % time saved asking for Data from other discipline. With Zeus, Engineers will not have to spend days searching for the right data, duplicating it and sharing it. Instead, they can just add their colleague as a collaborator with the required access and voila done.

2. 80% time Saved in copying Data from one place to other. From spending 1 entire week to prepare for Review meeting with stakeholder. Engineers can create custom reports which auto-populate when new data is uploaded.

3. No more switching between softwares. Engineers no longer need to maintain multiple copies of the same data in different software for different purposes. Zeus will be the one-stop solution for organizing, managing, and analyzing the collected data.

4. Traceability leading upto ISO 26262 compliance. Developers of components need to keep track of which parts of their implementation realize a given safety requirement and which test cases or measures verify that these implementations work