Yea-Huey Su

Virtual fab: an enabling framework and dynamic manufacturing service provision mechanism

The concepts of a virtual lab (VF) and manufacturing service (MS) have been proposed over recent years as a way to face the fierce competition of the semiconductor industry. This paper proposes a way to build a VF with a flexible manufacturing service in a highly specialized and uncertain environment. The VF enabling framework contains manufacturing service, business process (BP), and infrastructure (IR) layers. A novel dynamic manufacturing service provision mechanism (DMSPM) was designed to compose objects flexibly among the three layers of the various manufacturing services. The skeleton of the scheme includes name mapping, business process binding, resource reservation binding, and manufacturing service management binding to allow flexible service composition. To assess the feasibility and potential of the framework and our DMSPM, an order commitment service (OCS) provided by a foundry fab was used as an example. A prototype system was designed and implemented to demonstrate that current IT, CASE tools, a lab information infrastructure, and data/information availability make DMSPM readily realizable and that it has good possibilities in VF and e-business developments.

Pattern of vertical engineering collaboration between foundry and design service provider

As IC design and manufacturing complexities continue to increase exponentially, it is becoming less practical for a single company to provide products and services without collaborated partners. The goal of this research is then to explore how foundries and design service providers collaborate with each other under the new business paradigm. By conducting field interviews and empirical study on six collaboration cases, this research proposes four different collaboration patterns, which are: complementary-equity collaboration pattern, agent-equity collaboration pattern, complementary-nonequity collaboration pattern, and agent-nonequity collaboration pattern. There are several findings: 1) when both parties have stronger complementary assets relationship, the transaction cost is lower and the relationship is more stable; 2) long-term partnership and timing governance mechanism reduce negotiation effort and facilitate quick time-to-market; 3) closer collaboration process can significantly reduce the errors in design project

Inter-firm collaboration mechanism in process development and product design between foundry and fabless design house

As IC design and manufacturing complexities continue to increase exponentially, new collaboration mechanisms are required between IC design house and foundry. By conducting field interviews and empirical study, this research summarizes different engineering collaboration mechanisms under different stages of process technology. There are several findings: 1) The collaboration is mostly required when the design house develops advanced products and the foundry needs driving product house develop advanced processes; 2) The major effort of collaboration in advanced and developing processes is to find the critical failure modes in order to dramatically improve the yield of new process technology; 3) It is critical to have right experts from both parties; and 4) The migration from low yield toward high yield requires improvement through both product design tuning and process tuning. Partnership and close interactions are required for quick problem solving.

A dynamic binding model for service creation in virtual fab

Manufacturing service provisioning is one of the most important objectives of a virtual fab (VF). In this paper, we design a dynamic binding mechanism for creating a manufacturing service in a VF, especially the order management perspective. The mechanism is developed on top of object-orient modeling of a virtual fab. Key steps of the mechanism include name and resource mapping, business and operation process binding, resource reservation and service management binding. A simple example serves to illustrate the ideas, which are further described by a computer-aided software engineering tool to demonstrate the potential of the dynamic binding mechanism for real applications.

Realizing dynamic manufacturing service provisioning mechanism in order commitment service

In this paper a dynamic manufacturing service provisioning mechanism (DMSPM) is designed to flexibly create and execute manufacturing services under a virtual fab (VF) enabling framework The DMSPM exploits object-oriented (OO) technology to flexibly bind fab objects into services. It consists of four skeleton steps: name mapping, business process binding, resource reservation binding, and service management binding. To assess the feasibility and potential of DMSPM, the order commitment service (OCS) provided by a foundry serves as a study case. A prototype system is designed and implemented to realize DMSPM in the OCS application. The implementation demonstrated that current OO technology, CASE tools, Jab information infrastructure and data/information availability make DMSPM readily realizable and that DMSPM has a good potential for application to virtual Jab and e-business developments.

Evolutionary Engineering Collaboration for DFM/DFY Solutions between Foundry and EDA Tool Vendor

With the migration to deep-submicron technology, foundries face even more challenges than ever to help their customers to develop IC for time-to-market. The goal of this research is then to explore how foundries and EDA tool vendors collaborate with each other for DFM/DFY solutions. By conducting field interviews and empirical study on two leading foundries and three EDA tool vendors, this research summarizes four aspects of collaboration activities, which are design problem, design scope, released information, and collaboration mechanism, under three different collaboration stages. Results of the study show that in the era of DFM, both parties have expanded their collaboration activities, from post-design manufacturing stage to all stages of design. In addition, the collaboration pattern has transformed from input-output coordination to know-how sharing and then to know-how creation in 90nm technology. The study concludes that as design automation and process technology become more advanced, the value of reference flow becomes higher.

A conceptual framework for manufacturing service provisioning by virtual fabs

Fast growth of foundry fabs, fierce global competition and advancements of information technology have motivated in the semiconductor industry the concept of virtual fab (VF) with emphasis on manufacturing service provisioning. In this paper, a conceptual framework is proposed for VFs, which consists of three layers: infrastructure, business process, and virtual product layers. Data warehouse, open real-time simulation service, dynamic binding and customer-oriented interface constitute the four key ingredients of the infrastructure. Basic manufacturing business processes in the context of order management are then analyzed and manufacturing services are carefully classified within the VF framework. How the proposed VF infrastructure facilitates these services and how service quality should be managed demand future research.