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.