Engineering Chain: A Novel Semiconductor Engineering Collaboration Model

As an integrated circuit (IC) design house adopts a new semiconductor manufacturing technology for a new IC design, the failure rate and design cycle of the new technology are much higher than those of the mature technologies. Consequently, shortening the IC design cycle of a new technology becomes more difficult since a design house needs to finish the design with more complicated processes in a shorter cycle time. IC suppliers will lose their competition and market if they cannot cut the cycle time from IC design to IC mass-production. This paper proposes a novel engineering-chain (EC) collaboration model to formulate this high-IC-design-failure-rate and long-IC-design-cycle problem. The goals of EC are improving IC-design success rate, reducing cycle time, and increasing revenue. This paper also proposes an engineering chain management system (ECMS) to help achieve the goals of EC. In order to accommodate the EC requirements, it is required to extend the existing computer-integrated-manufacturing scope of a foundry from single-factor operating control to cross-industry operating control. This paper applies the concept of framework to design the ECMS and adopts the new-generation interoperable document-centric computing technology, webservices, as the enabling technology for the communication interface of the ECMS framework. All of the EC-related concepts and requirements are well established in this paper and the ECMS is a linkage of these concepts into a single business process to achieve the EC goals.