Abstract
The electronics industry is in the highly competitive environment. High-tech product innovation and technology migration are increasingly changing, while the product life cycles are shortening at the same time. IC design industry is a critical part of the supply chain of the electronics industry that is facing the same competition with increasing capital investments driven by Moore’s Law. The decision for seleting projects for the R&D portfolio is crucial for the profitability and competitive advantages of the IC design company in order to survive and sustain in the consumer electronics era. However, little research has been done to address this need and involved issues. To fill the gaps, this aims to construct a decision framework based on UNISON decision framework to employ data envelopment analysis (DEA) and simple multi-attribute ranking technique (SMART) to develop a decision-making model for IC design project portfolio considering important attributes and parameters of IC design projects and domain knowledge. In particular, this thesis addressed three issues that were rarely studied in the existing studies: (1)Explain and elaborate the framework of the IC design project portfolio problems for the current IC design industry and what attributes are the decision makers really concerned. (2)Analysis and evaluation methodology using data envelopment analysis (DEA) to analyze the efficient frontier of different IC design projects. (3)Sort out the best IC design project portfolio using simple multi-attribute rating technique (SMART) with weighted method. This thesis used real data adopted an IC design company in Taiwan for an empirical study to illustrate the proposed approach for validation. The results have shown practical viability of the proposed approach.