Design Of Manufacturing Strategy With Wafer Cost Estimation

In the semiconductor industry progress has been achieved by building fablines that implement smaller feature sizes. This successful strategy has produced a constant decrease in cost and improvcment in performance with a resultant constant increase in the cost of fablines. These heavy investments can be justified by high volume or large profit products. However, many medium volume manufacturers can not compete with "larger-volume" or "cash-rich" competitors. This paper will focus on a strategy to minimize the cost of manufacturing based on a product complexity oriented cost modeling technique.