D-SIMLAB

Simulation support for semicon and aerospace

In Singapore, Gan Boon Ping has been involved in simulation technology application and development since 1995. Today, as CEO and co-founder of D-SIMLAB Technologies, he helps lead the way in high-performance simulation-based decision support to enable both aerospace and semiconductor companies to optimise their performance in a sustainable, economic manner. Boon Ping looks back on their journey from research institute to SME and the recent participation in their first ITEA project, AISSI.

Need for speed

The story of D-SIMLAB began when Boon Ping worked as a researcher for the Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology and led a multi-year research project funded by the R&D agency A*STAR. This focused on parallel and distributed simulation because simulation in general needed to run at a much faster speed to become practical for industry. “Of course, there is not much use for just having a simulation run faster without a use-case,” smiles Boon Ping. “So, we found two semiconductor fabrication plants in Singapore - Chartered Semiconductor, now GlobalFoundries, and SSMC, a joint venture of NXP and TSMC - and executed simulation projects for them. This meant applying my skillset in computer science to industrial applications.”

“When a research institute develops technology, you typically hand it over to the customer through IP licensing. But the issue is that simulation is not something straightforward that a company will have the core competency to maintain, build and make successful and useful. So, along with my co-founders Dr Peter Lendermann and Dr Nirupam Julka, we came up with the idea of starting a company.”

Two key elements

By chance, the creation of D-SIMLAB coincided with a paradigm shift in the aerospace industry in which spare parts ownership and inventories were outsourced to third parties instead of being maintained by airlines themselves. The fledging start-up therefore shifted to solutions for optimising inventory allocation across airports around the world. With the difficulties facing aviation due to COVID-19, they are again putting substantial resources into the semiconductor domain. This dual focus is reflected in two solutions: D-SIMSPAIR and D-SIMCON, each of which comprises a suite of advanced, domain-specific decision-support modules for planning and optimisation.

“Speed is a key thing,” remarks Boon Ping. “If you look at our competitors providing similar simulation solutions, their runtime is at least two to three times longer than ours. It usually takes an hour or two to run a simulation forecast, so two or three times longer matters. The second aspect is that if you sell general-purpose solutions, your customer has to build everything from scratch and ensure that the simulation model accurately represents reality, requiring a lot of time and investment. Since our solution is tailor-made, it consolidates a lot of domain knowledge within the software itself. For the customer, it’s about feeding data into the system rather than building the model on their own. Deployment time can be reduced from twelve months to six months and the success probability is much higher. So far, you could say it’s at 100% because all customers continue to use our simulation solution today.”