Abstract
Being able to provide a diverse range of products with superior quality of the Silicon Intellectual Property (hereafter referred to as SIP) serves as a competitive advantage for any semiconductor foundry. There are many factors that may influence the quality of SIPs. Among them, the human errors on the product development and assurance procedure are inevitable and frequently seen; they are in fact the root cause of many problems. The commonly used techniques for improvement including education and training, an introduction of mistake-proofing mechanism, and the enhancement of work environment, etc. However, the most widely applied technique is the usage of checklists. Checklists may be applied in an extensive scope. Researches have also developed a variety of checklists according to the different demands from different industries aiming to prevent any negative outcome caused by human errors. However, the results found from this practical analysis on the checklists of SIP development cycle shows that the forms are either too simple to include the key factors or tediously long which impacts the workload of engineers. By studying into the problems, it is found that not only the ergonomic factors have not been considered carefully in designing the original checklists but the key steps that often involved with human errors also are not being reinforced. In contrary, managers tend to focus more on just the paper work, and merely on the improvement to lessen the human errors. The impact of human errors and its severity are not well understood or seen; thus, the resources devoted for further improvements are often insufficient and the unnecessary opportunities costs are wasted. This research has taken an Intellectual Property Design Department of a wafer foundry as the subject of study. The focus is to examine the checklists of SIP development flow, and analyze the potential human factors, which should be emphasized by the managers. The possible key factors are derived and summarized from the study of questionnaires and in-depth personal interviews. The modified checklists with those human factors taking into consideration can now help engineers to well control the potential human errors and effectively prevent the occurrence of such errors during the process of research and development. Keywords: Silicon Intellectual Property、Checklist、Human Error