An Electronic Material Flow Control System for Improving Production Efficiency in Integrated-Circuit Packaging Industry

Efficiency and accuracy are the two main factors to develop the competence for the integrated-circuit (IC) packaging industry. An IC packaging house needs to deal with problems integrating production flows of wafer in, packaging, test, and shipping in order to provide clients instant and accurate products and services information. Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is an effective electronic information carrying device to collect and alter data. In this study, RFID technology, combined with RosettaNet network and enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, is applied to resolve the wafer receiving and inventory transaction problems. An electronic material flow control system for IC packaging houses is developed using Oracle application implementation methodology to integrate RFID technology, RosettaNet network, and ERP system. The developed electronic material flow control system is implemented in a local IC packaging company. Results from this study suggest that labor cost and man-made errors are reduced due to the significant improvement for wafer receiving process and inventory transaction process using RFID technology. Besides that, the developed material flow control system enhances the capability of the ERP systems so as to greatly reduce operators' workload and operation costs for IC packaging houses.