In recent years, we have seen substantial progress on the journey towards Smart Manufacturing in the semiconductor manufacturing value chain. Smart manufacturing represents a multifaceted challenge to adopters involving multidisciplinary adoption of complex and emerging technologies including: Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), advanced automation, big data management and analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, and digital twins. While adoption of these technologies in the front-end wafer fabrication arena has demonstrated substantial success towards meeting the goals of delivering improved operating cost, throughput, and quality, applying these technologies in the semiconductor assembly backend has proven more challenging for a variety of reasons. In this presentation, we will discuss our insights on value drivers for smart manufacturing in the semiconductor backend, and the path forward for successful partnering between equipment and device manufacturers for delivery of high value Smart Manufacturing solutions.
In this presentation, we will discuss progress and roadblocks identified so far in our journey to deploy data- enabled assembly equipment, real time process monitoring, advanced process controls, advanced recovery features, machine learning based fault detections, automated material handling systems, digital twins, and big data analytics towards process optimization and machine health monitoring. Each of these technologies provides a complex array of benefits, challenges, and costs. Deployment progress for each will be discussed and case examples provided.
While the front-end wafer fabrication has ample return on investment opportunity for improving overall equipment efficiency and wafer yield, the semiconductor assembly factory has substantially less upside potential due to very high baseline quality and yields, generally high equipment utilization rates, and relatively low unit yield loss cost. That said, it is clear that semiconductor assembly facilities face tremendous competitive pressure to improve quality, reliability, yield, cost, throughput, and labor utilization. Smart Manufacturing will surely be part of the solution. In order to successfully leverage these technologies, the semiconductor assembly industry needs to better understand and demonstrate the ROI of smart manufacturing technologies while reducing costs and barriers to implementation. We will address these value drivers and provide insights and recommendations for furthering smart manufacturing adoption in semiconductor assembly.
