Enhancing Semiconductor Technology Development by Co-Development and Supply Chain Integration

Abstract

Semiconductor product development becomes increasingly challenging due to diminishing product life cycles, miniaturization, introduction of new physical principles, and new manufacturing processes. These problems are compounded in the absence of standardized development processes for the most complex semiconductor products like MEMS technologies, because the manufacturing of these products is often outsourced. Suppliers play a pivoting role in the realization of the product, from product design until process design and ramp-up. The supplier selection problem in this industry denotes the challenges in finding the right supplier while meeting all the technical, process and business requirements. The contribution of this research is in presenting how to develop a generic methodology for data-driven co-development. Thereby, this work presents a novel product development framework that leverages co-development and supply chain integration through data-driven decision-making. Co-development is reached through standardized methods for generating the required engineering output for supplier selection. Supply chain integration is introduced in the early stages of product development. This synthesizes with the outsourced manufacturing processes. Clustering algorithms are used to effectively shortlist suppliers based on their competences, and provide insights into supplier profiles and gaps. The latter is used to draw strategies for developing unattainable technologies. Using the framework, the required engineering output for supplier selection was generated in 77% less time while reducing information asymmetries between actors in the product development process. Furthermore, the framework made it possible to quantify decisions, allowed for supplier profile recognition and gap identification through its hybrid automated approach, and supplier shortlisting in 95% less time. This efficiency does not only showcase the immediate benefits of the proposed methodology, but also lays the foundation for future research towards a fully automated approach in semiconductor product development. The developed framework includes information flows between actors and steps in the product development process, their interfaces and demonstrates its added value and potential for a fully automated yet efficient future approach in semiconductor product development.