Foreground of Microsystem Industry and Its Foundry Fabricator
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Abstract:
Many novel microsystem fabricator companies and research organizations are absorbed into the microsystem field by its magnitude market, although which is still potential and venturing by now. Microsystem, at this time, are forced to face a serial of problem from design simulation to fabricator and packing etc. , because of the absence of industry standard which could be accepted abroad. The business mode affording to microsystem to choose still can not be made certain, but with the development of microsystem technology will come over all the problems, and drive the microsystem to develope into another support of semiconductor market.Keywords:
Microsystem
Instrumentation
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The process of semiconductor (IC Package) manufacturing usually includes lots of complex and sequential processes. Many kinds of equipments are installed with the mixed concept of serial and parallel manufacturing system. The business environments of the semiconductor industry have been changed frequently, because new technologies are developed continuously. It is the main reason of new investment plan and layout consideration. However, it is difficult to change the layout after installation, because the major equipments are expensive and difficult to move. Thus, new investment or changing layout should be carefully considered when the production environments are changed likewise product mix and production quantity. This paper introduces a simulation case study of a Korean company that produces packaging substrates (especially lead frames). QUEST® is used for simulation modeling, and various strategies for the environmental changes are evaluated.
Integrated circuit packaging
Semiconductor device fabrication
Investment
Semiconductor Industry
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A number of new OEM sensor technologies have been fully commercialized over the last decade, resulting in a proliferation of new applications. These "enabling" sensor technologies have furthered the development of new products that were heretofore precluded due to the prohibitive costs associated with traditional sensors. Sensor technologies which embrace batch processing techniques possess inherent features including: - high volume production capability - low manufacturing cost - high reliability - rugged item-to-item uniformity - small size. As such, they are becoming the technologies of choice. Not only are they being incorporated into new product design, but they are also replacing their large, costly and less reliable cousins in many applications. This scenario is analogous to digital watch IC technology replacing the standard "Swiss" or handmade watches. This paper will discuss a number of the more significant advanced sensor technologies available to the OEM designer and will provide background on the OEM sensor industry including its size, user needs and requirements.
Original equipment manufacturer
Emerging Technologies
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Manufacturing of micro-systems differs from IC manufacturing because the market requires a diversity of products and lower volumes per product. In addition, a diversity of micro-technologies has been developed, including non-IC compatible processes and potentially IC compatible processes. An infrastructure for the production of micro- system devices is lacking. On one side the technology for MST is available at the universities and small university related companies. On the other side there are several small and medium enterprises and bigger companies wanting to implement MST devices in their products, but unwilling to be dependent on universities. Philips Electronics in the Netherlands and Twente MicroProducts realized this problem and have started a project to fill this gap. At this moment the basic of the infrastructure is available: OnStream BV, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, opened its waferfab and assembly facilities for the production of MST devices. Twente MicroProducts will take care of the design of the products and of the small-scale production. Integration of quality systems for maintenance, yield, statistical process control and production in a Manufacturing Execution System offers direct access for all people involved to all the relevant information. It also ensures quality of the products made. The available capabilities of the infrastructure in the current status are compared to the market needs. In this article, a description of a seamless Micro-System Engineering Foundry is given. A seamless organization is capable of helping the customer from design to production. Several examples are given.
Microsystem
Time to market
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Faced with increasing technical and commercial challenges from the Far East, many U.S. semiconductor manufacturers have been directing their efforts toward the Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) or custom integrated circuit marketplace. This market is flourishing because advances in technologies such as gate arrays and standard cells now make it significantly easier to obtain system cost and performance advantages by integrating nonstandard functions on silicon. They are attractive to U.S. manufacturers because they place a premium on sophisticated design tools, familiarity with customer needs and applications, and fast turn-around fabrication. These are areas where U.S. manufacturers believe they have an advantage and, consequently, they believe they will not suffer from the severe price/manufacturing competition encountered in conventional high-volume semiconductor products. In the past, automation was often considered viable only for high-volume manufacturing, but automation becomes a necessity in the new ASIC environment. ASIC requirements for increased product variability, strict delivery schedules, and the need to guarantee acceptable yields at the individual wafer level (as opposed to yields averaged over large lots) are the areas which automation must address. These challenges, combined with the need for more efficient and contamination-free production environments, are certain to stress the resources of even the most competent companies. This paper explores some challenges which must be met before automated custom device manufacturing can be successful and outlines the role automation will play in helping to meet these challenges.
Application-specific integrated circuit
Semiconductor device fabrication
Wafer fabrication
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ASP-DAC 2004: Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference 2004 (IEEE Cat. No.04EX753) (2004)
Summary form only given. A strategy for research and development, as well as for product definition and marketing for electronic systems in view of the incoming nano era requires expertise and even excellence in so many diverse areas that even the largest semiconductor industry in the world, INTEL, cannot conceive it in isolation. The worldwide trend is to develop joint program between industry and academia with public and industrial funding sustained over a rather long time horizon to develop methods and technologies to master the difficult art of integrated system design. The central problem to be overcome is that traditional approaches to design and tools will not scale. Moreover, existing designers will not scale too because they do not have the required pluridisciplinary scale to deal with SoC. The strategic direction of EuroSoC is to address these issues by lining up the research community and by providing a framework where its collective knowledge can be fostered and fully leveraged by industry and society in general.
Excellence
Center of excellence
Isolation
Operational excellence
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Outside of the box thinking is needed innovating semiconductor industry out of its potential low growth forecast due to economical debating for future directions. This paper suggests a combination of new business model and innovative fabricator architecture designed to meet market demands and providing a holistic eco-system for semiconductor industry to grow. The new fabricator design adapts existing technologies and does not require new scheduled inventions.
Semiconductor Industry
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RF MEMS activities until now has been driven by universities. For production of these enabling components a new industry is needed. RF MEMS processing is very different and even incompatible with traditional IC processing for at least two reasons: (1) the metals used are unfamiliar and often forbidden in semiconductor processing, (2) making free standing structures needs a specialist knowledge of the properties and the processing of these metals. Even for experienced MEMS institutes/companies making these products is a challenge, and as a result, they can only fulfill the first demands of the customers: i.e. testing of the possibilities of this new technology and proving its feasibility. These first players are generalists, having a broad knowledge of MEMS processes and applications. However, upcoming demand from the market asks different capabilities. Most customers nowadays are not looking for a few `breadboard' samples based on the latest available processes. They need non-technical capabilities like: reproducibility, reliability, timely delivery, etc. Much work has to be done to fit the design demands into the foundries and bring the production processes to a level comparable to mature industries such as semiconductor or magnetic head industries.
Breadboard
Materials processing
Semiconductor Industry
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The manufacturing of semiconductors has always been a difficult process, where long throughput times of up to three months and chaotic manufacturing processes have created an industry that struggles to react effectively to market changes. Intel has adopted its mirror approach, whereby all of its fabs are identical, allowing the company to move product from one facility to another. Constrained by less manufacturing capacity, AMD has taken another route and created an entirely new manufacturing model that emphasises speed, accuracy and agility to allow it to better respond to customer needs. In this paper, we introduce the 'automated precision manufacturing' (APM) concept. It allows the company to react to market needs, gives it a more rapid introduction of advanced technologies as well as achieving better quality and higher efficiencies.
Semiconductor device fabrication
Semiconductor Industry
Manufacturing
Manufacturing process
Customer needs
Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing
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Summary form only give, as follows. The idea of a dedicated foundry started as a one-man vision eleven years ago with establishment of TSMC and blossomed into a multi-billion industry today. With the ever higher cost of building a new IC fab and the success of "virtual fab" business model, dedicated foundry companies have greater opportunities to increase their market share in the semiconductor industry. The customer base is extending beyond traditional fabless IC companies, system and sub-system vendors into integrated device manufacturers (IDM). In the past, foundry companies were always one to two generations behind the leading-edge technologies developed by top semiconductor companies. However, with the increasing demand of high performance IC chips and shortening of IC product life cycle as well as staying competitiveness in process technology, foundry companies have made greater progress in catching up to be at par with the leading IC companies. With the adoption of generic technologies which are used by a large group of customers and the gains in manufacturing economy of scale, the results are much reduced manufacturing cost. Another proof of the success of the foundry offered technologies is the proliferation of cell libraries based on foundry specific technologies. Meanwhile, the services that foundry companies provide will also have to reach the level of one-stop turn-key services. These include value-added design related services such as verified cell libraries and IP providers as well as backend activities such as packaging and testing. The concept of a virtual fab crystallizes the essence of what services a successful foundry company have to provide. It has to be a seamless interface between customers and foundries. It has to be: responsive and convenient, even more than customer's own fab in the case of IDM customers. Leading edge manufacturing technology, advanced and flexible computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) system, world-class certified quality, and services are the areas that we believe will be the challenges to the foundry industry in the 21th century.
Foundry
Semiconductor Industry
Manufacturing
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During the past few years, remarkable affords have been made for the realization of microscale sensors, actuators and microelectromechanical system. Due to advances in solid state and micromachining technologies, significant advances in designing, fabricating and testing of microminiaturized devices have been achieved at laboratory level. However, the technical and economical realization of microelectromechanical systems is considerably impeded by the lack of satisfying device technology for their industrial production. A production concept for the industrial production of hybrid microelectromechanical systems was developed and investigated. The concept is based on the resources and requirements of medium-sized enterprises and is characterized by its flexibility. Microsystem fabrication is separated into microfabrication steps performed in-house and technological steps performed by external technology providers. The modularity of the concept allows for a gradual increase in the degree of automation and the in-house production depth, depending on market capacity and financial resources. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, the design and realization of a microfabrication process center, which includes tasks like transport and handling, processing, cleaning, testing and storing are discussed. Special attention is given to the supply and feeding of microparts, to the necessary magazines, trays and transport systems, to the implementation of homogeneous mechanical, environmental and information interfaces, to the employment of advanced control, scheduling, and lot tracking concepts, and to the application of highly modular and cost-efficient clean production concepts.
Microsystem
Microscale chemistry
Modularity
Realization (probability)
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