Abstract
The semiconductor industry in Taiwan has become a mature industry, whose industry structure is a unique vertical separation model compared to that of the other countries. Taiwan’s IC testing business, which belongs to the downstream part of the semiconductor supply chain, is top-notch in the world in terms of the OEM capability and the scale of output value. It is quite competitive nowadays among integrated device manufactures. Considering the cost, the testing time in mature products has been significantly reduced, which means IC testing companies need to improve production efficiency to keep their competitiveness. For factories, production capability is a key competitiveness index so that how to improve production efficiency is a very important subject for IC testing companies. Machines easily become idle due to short testing time. This research focused on the factors which had influence on the idle time in short testing time machines and tried to improve production efficiency of machines. In addition, the research was applied to a semiconductor testing company in Taiwan. Causes and effects chart and design of experiment were used to look for the significant factors affecting idle time of IC testing machines so that the capacity loss can be minimized. According to the factors, some proposals were put forward to raise the production efficiency, average reduction 19% of the short test time’s minimum time which means an increase of 19 percent of output.