Abstract
The production model of the IC Foundry business is BTO (Build to Order); that is, if there are no engineering changes or unexpected conditions, the Foundry will process and go for mass production after getting the order and arranging for the wafer-start. It is the normal IC foundry production process flow. However, the demand of the whole semiconductor supply chain is very unstable. How to enhance the production flexibility and real time response to customer are the key point for IC foundry to become the manufacturing services business. This research mainly focuses on how the Foundry matches the product strategy of upstream IC design house (fast demand change, versatile and less quantity), in order to lower production cost and shorten the time to market. Using delayed differentiation methodology and changing to push-pull supply chain from push-based supply chain with automatic and electronic operation, the Foundry manages to decrease the variations of capacity planning and to improve the response to the change of customer’s demand. The main issue is, while facing the highly complicated Foundry production process flow, how to decrease production control complexity and miss-operation, in addition to increase flexibility, in order to fulfill customer’s requirements. This research uses actual participations, observations, and interviews in the case firm’s project execution to build up the model of push-pull supply chain production process flow with delayed differentiation strategy. The research provides a practical model of Foundry process improvement with the strategy. The results of this study promotes the win-win cooperation between IC design house and Foundry, and also provide other Foundries to quickly duplicate the production process flow with delayed differentiation strategy.