how about something completely different? (sucks how a 36% haircut sours a board's mood.)
following is a nice piece on UMC. apparently, they're the first foundry to enable online production scheduling (via i2's Available To Promise module). i haven't exactly kept on top of the fabs of late, but the last time i checked, AMCC employed IBM (for CMOS, SiGe), and TSMC, AMI and Kawasaki (CMOS), outside their internal foundries. MMCN uses TSMC and UMC (CMOS), and Oki and NEC Japan (turnkey).
note to TA1: fwiw, there are several long-term buy & holders on the board. if this isn't exceedingly gauche, i'm in three times since my initial buy late last summer. most recently for the IRA (uh, yeah, last week). haven't sold a share and don't plan on it for some time.
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October 23, 2000, Issue: 1234
Section: News
UMC customers get personalized portal
Crista Souza
techweb.com
Silicon Valley -- United Microelectronics Corp. is rolling out a system that it claims will allow customers to book wafers for production, fine-tune their product mix, and fix yield problems in real time from their Internet browser.
The My UMC portal, which debuts today, is just one more example of how foundries are striving to become an extension of their customers' internal operations to improve service. It also further differentiates Hsinchu, Taiwan-based UMC from the competition, said Jim Ballingall, vice president of worldwide marketing in Sunnyvale, Calif.
"We see half of our business being conducted through the Internet by the middle of next year," Ballingall said. "We're putting a system in place to facilitate that."
UMC's next step will be to link the production scheduling system to the back end, enabling fab customers to automatically schedule shipment of finished lots to their next destination, which might be a wafer sort or an assembly and test site, Ballingall said.
Foundries and their customers -- particularly the fabless set -- are at the forefront of implementing supply-chain management solutions out of necessity, according to analyst James Hines of Dataquest Inc., San Jose.
"Fabless companies outsource 100% of their wafer fabrication, which means they need to have as much instant access to information as possible," he said.
At the same time, providing virtual access to the fab's operations raises the comfort level of integrated device manufacturers (IDMs), which are accustomed to being able to see and manage production in their own facilities but are increasingly farming out manufacturing to save cost, noted Joanne Itow, an analyst at Semico Research Corp., Phoenix.
"This is something a lot of IDMs feel is critical in terms of their being able to feel more in control of their specific product as it's going through the fab," she said.
At the heart of My UMC is the Available To Promise engine, developed by i2 Technologies Inc. The system works with databases built by Oracle Corp. to allow registered users to view available capacity and receive a commitment and quote within minutes.
This doesn't mean anyone off the street can go into the system and reserve fab space, nor can an existing UMC customer instantly grab more wafers than they've been allocated -- or dump unneeded capacity, for that matter.
Rather, the service allows fab customers to schedule allocated wafers for production, adjust product mix, and analyze yields in real time. What would ordinarily take days or weeks of sifting through data to find the appropriate slot in the right fab for a given customer's product lot can now be scheduled automatically, according to Ballingall.
For a customer like Xilinx Inc., which has a wide product mix that varies in demand from month to month, or even week to week, the challenge has been matching production with available capacity -- which becomes a pretty complex equation, given that UMC operates eight fabs running a half-dozen different process technologies, Ballingall said.
"What we're looking at here is time savings, as opposed to delays in uncovering capacity through the decision-support tools available to production planners," he said. "The customer plugs in their requirements, and the computer finds the best slot instantaneously. It might find a slot better than the old process."
Business rules programmed in will trigger the system to alert a fab sales representative if a user orders more wafers than they've contracted for. Assuming there's any excess capacity to claim, the sales rep and the customer can then work out a solution, Ballingall said.
Once a customer gets commitment dates for wafer starts and wafer outs, My UMC will allow the customer to track the wafers in real time through every step of the process, with continual automatic updates. Previously, work-in-progress (WIP) reports were manually updated every four hours.
Additionally, engineering and data-analysis tools are available on the My UMC portal for customers to analyze yields and make adjustments while the wafers are in process. Under the old system, customers would download the data from UMC and use analysis tools either purchased or developed in-house.
The type of capability My UMC provides will become a competitive imperative for pure-play foundries, which must differentiate themselves by their level of service, Dataquest's Hines said.
"There's no real barrier to implementing similar types of systems. In fact, UMC is taking a page out of its own book by outsourcing to i2 and Oracle those capabilities it doesn't have in-house," Hines said.
While UMC is the first to enable online production scheduling, its two nearest rivals, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Pte. Ltd. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd., offer various levels of Internet service. TSMC provides online chip layout and mask-inspection tools for remote design-team collaboration, as well as a way for customers to view WIP reports online.
Chartered has gone the additional step of creating an alliance with two of its largest customers, Lucent Technologies Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co., to develop standardized data-exchange formats framed around WIP tasks. The eFAB Alliance is working with the RosettaNet semiconductor manufacturing management board to advance the guidelines across the spectrum of semiconductor companies, foundries, EDA tool vendors, and IP providers. |
