Engineering-chain requirements for semiconductor industry

The successful rate of microelectronic device's first design declines year by year. The first design failure results in increasing the design cost because of adding the possible expenses of the subsequent design revisions. Also, the shorter life cycle due to late start of mass-production may incur lower revenue of device selling. Therefore, the requirement for an efficient and effective microelectronic device's design cycle is needed. Different from IDM (integrated design and manufacturing), current semiconductor industry has a new business model. Device designer, which does not have any of the following resources: IP/library, mask operation, foundry FAB, IC assembly house and IC test house, but they still can design and manufacture a device by communicating with the global-community resources. Actually, more than 30% of semiconductor revenue is from fabless design houses, foundry service providers and professional assembly/test houses. The microelectronic device's design cycle needs tremendous amount of engineering data exchange in this collaboration. The microelectronic device design cycle with engineering collaboration is defined as "engineering chain". A well-defined requirement of this engineering-chain operation for improving the successful rate of microelectronic device's design, reducing design cost and increasing revenue is therefore essential. Also, this requirement becomes the foundations for an engineering chain management system to provide a common platform to integrate heterogeneous processes as a unified operation.