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Emerging Trends

The additional forces acting on the manufacturing environment have little to do with Moore's Law. These forces are discussed in the National Science Foundation sponsored program, "Next Generation Manufacturing" conducted by the Leaders For Manufacturing program at MIT, the Agility Forum and the Technology to Enable Lean Manufacturing [2]. The major issues are listed in Table 4.

Globalization refers to the fact that for a number of reasons, industries are locating manufacturing facilities in many geographical locations, utilizing a supply of skilled workers at reasonable wages and servicing a widely dispersed customer base. As a result, suppliers of parts, materials, and equipment for these factories have had to become globalized, since operating conditions for manufacturers dictate that short time to delivery to the local customer is a matter of competitive necessity.

Due to the pervasive and timely availability of information and knowledge, global competition is more aggressive: new products are developed and brought to market quickly to globally distributed customers. Consequently, there is an erosion of what had been known as customer loyalty. Just as industrial jobs are no longer secure for life, brand-name loyalty on the part of a customer is not likely to survive; customers shop around for the most convenient or persuasive supplier.

Customers' expectations are increasing: they expect on-time delivery of high-quality customized products at prices reflective of high-volume manufacturing costs, and great service; otherwise, they will find other suppliers without hesitation. Quality is a given, not a differentiator; if one producer's product does not exhibit high quality, the customer will quickly find someone else.

Environmental concerns are also becoming more important in response to government regulations and societal concerns. Industry is recognizing that environmentally sound manufacturing is more rewarding than environmentally insensitive manufacturing.

Firms expecting to compete in the next millennium will have to play this ball game, on this playing field, with these new rules, encumbered as well by the needs and requirements listed in Table 3. These are the challenges the semiconductor industry faces as markets change, customer requirements change, and political and socio-economic forces affect how business is carried out.

Information Technology Responses

Two items listed in Table 4 were not discussed above: new technologies, materials, and processes; and greater access to global information and knowledge. The first refers to the fact that we can now create materials and structures on an atomic scale, with properties hitherto not only unavailable, but undreamed of. New products such as micro-motors, micro-refrigerators, micro-turbines, device analysis tools, and packaging will probably generate significant business in the not-too-distant future. However, since these do not concern semiconductor chip costs at the moment, they are not discussed further here. For details on these opportunities, see the NGM report [2] .

The explosion of information technology (IT) is however another story. Indeed, information technology--the pervasive generation, storage, distribution and use of information and knowledge--seems to be the technology that may help resolve ALL the dilemmas of cost and competitiveness. IT can help with the declining rate of cost per chip element and increased cost per factory, as well as those emerging manufacturing needs identified in Table 4. In the remainder of this paper, we discuss how specific elements of information technology can be used to significantly impact all these issues.

Two applications of information technology that appear to have the greatest leverage are operational modeling and simulation, and management of knowledge assets and intellectual capital. In addition, these programs also affect the third way of decreasing these costs, the ramp speed to high-volume manufacturing. For example, Intel's Copy EXACTLY! policy is one way of managing our corporate knowledge and wisdom to increase ramp speed. However, ramp rate improvement is not discussed further in this paper. Please refer to "The Evolution of Intel's Copy EXACTLY! Technology Transfer Method" in this issue of the Intel Technology Journal for a fuller description of this important program.

Operational modeling and simulation (OM&S) and management of knowledge assets and intellectual capital applications have different purposes. OM&S is used to lower the cost and speed up the process of trying alternative solutions to different operational scenarios. It can provide quicker and more accurate answers to questions such as how much equipment or how many people are needed to perform a given number of activities; how can a factory be laid out for improved efficiency; how can equipment be best located to provide high throughput and still be easily accessible for maintenance; or how equipment operation can be best scheduled to improve overall capital utilization. In order to answer these questions, different alternatives can be tried out on the computer, saving months or years of physical experimentation time, and millions or even tens of millions of dollars of experimental materials and equipment time.

In Knowledge Management (KM), ever more transient users can access vast sources of data, information and knowledge in real time to enable them to make more informed and higher quality decisions. This information is wide in scope and sufficiently deep to enable one versed in the use of such technology to make and execute decisions with unparalleled ability. Considering that the value of a corporation is more and more dependent on intellectual assets (patents, know-how, trade secrets, processing and product knowledge, best-known methods, etc.) than on capital assets (equipment, buildings, rights of way, etc.) it is not surprising that significant attention is now being paid to knowledge management.

Both OM&S and KM can be beneficially applied to the many domains of manufacturing including scheduling, using the theory of constraints tied to operational models; enterprise integration tied to enterprise models; electronic commerce; capacity planning and factory layout improvements, tied to comprehensive factory models; improved equipment utilization and performance, tied to equipment and material handling models. All these domains can benefit significantly from OM&S and KM. Using these methods, we can now start to overcome some of the limitations we face as yields approach 100%, as factory automation approaches an economical limit, and as increased wafer diameter and increased package complexity continue to add to the cost of running a large factory.

Some examples of how these two information and knowledge capabilities can be used to help improve operational efficiency are illustrated below.

Operational Modeling

OM&S is used widely in process development, wafer fabrication, assembly test, manufacturing support, and other parts of the manufacturing enterprise. Savings accrued through the use of OM&S can be substantial, in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Generally speaking, OM&S capabilities are directly linked to improvement of major factory performance metrics: cost reduction, delivery improvement, quality improvement or product performance improvement. Factory improvement issues are often stated thus: "If I change this and that, how does the result affect my bottom line performance?" or "What if I did this instead of that (if I added or removed people from the line; if I laid out the equipment differently; if I used this strategy vs. that one to schedule downtime, and so on), how would factory performance be changed?" Consequently, OM&S programs are often called "what-if" scenarios. They are used to save time and money. Running a physical experiment, i.e., re-laying out a product line, can take months or years compared to running a simulation, which can take minutes or hours. Or, running a physical experiment can cost too much. Running a single experiment in an operating fab could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.


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