1. Purpose of the gate
Concept approval answers one question: does this product concept justify funding a full definition? The concept team has had its time box to turn an accepted opportunity into something specific enough to judge. It has written the market requirements, sketched and compared concept options, asked engineering whether the concept can be built, modelled the money and tested the idea with lead customers. The gate weighs all of that and either releases funding for Definition & Planning or does not.
The gate is not the development commit. It funds definition, not development. That distinction matters because the definition stage is where the product requirements, make, buy or partner choices, cost and price targets and the integrated plan are worked out; concept approval should not demand that level of certainty, and it should not be treated as permission to start design. What it does fix is the market view: once approved, the market requirements are baselined with the business case, and later changes go through change control.
Concept approval is the same decision seen from several sides. The SoC lifecycle's concept approval, the analog and mixed-signal lifecycle's concept approval, the chiplet lifecycle's multi-die concept approval and the FPGA lifecycle's concept approval all match this gate. Holding one review, with one record, keeps the business and the engineering lifecycles on the same footing: the architecture work that follows starts from the same approved market requirements and business case.
| Engineering gate | Lifecycle | Relation | What it brings to this gate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Concept approval | SoC | Matches | The chip project's view of the same decision; its specification and architecture work starts from the approved business case. |
| Concept approval | Analog and mixed-signal | Matches | The circuit's concept approval, bringing the business case and the first performance expectations. |
| Multi-die concept approved | Chiplet | Matches | The decision that a multi-die approach is worth defining, with its business case. |
| Concept approval | FPGA | Matches | The decision that a product built on a programmable device is worth defining. |
10 more sections for registered members.