If the PLC is the business-level story of a chip, covering market case, requirements, commitment, and ramp, the PDLC (Product Development Lifecycle) is what happens inside its execution stage: the purely engineering sequence that turns a committed specification into a mask set ready for the foundry. Where the PLC asks "should we build this and what should it do," the PDLC asks "how, exactly, do we build it."
Execution starts once the PRD hands off a committed architecture and micro-architecture spec. RTL designers write that architecture in a hardware description language, block by block, against interfaces and timing budgets the architecture team has already defined. The further along the PDLC a team is, the more expensive it gets to revisit an architectural decision, which is exactly why the PLC's gate discipline exists upstream of it.
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