Economic Impacts during Microelectronics Product Design

Abstract An integral part of product design for manufacture is the use of predictive cost models to quantify the effects of early design decisions. An investigation has been performed to develop a set of detailed cost models to estimate the economic impact of microelectronics integrated circuit (IC) design alternatives. Cost-of-Ownership models, developed for IC fabrication equipment, are extended to the various cost domains in the microelectronics development cycle, including optical lithography and design for test solutions. The developed cost models have been implemented in software tools and these utilised to assess the effects of various design and processing options on overall IC manufacturing costs