Novel Semiconductor Business Model - Engineering Chain for the Semiconductor Industry

The foundry business model was first developed by TSMC in 1985. A foundry should provide customers with IC manufacturing services. Those customers include IC design houses, integrated device manufacturers (IDM), and system suppliers. However, most electronic products are consumer products, and their life cycle has been reducing with time. An IC design house needs to continuously develop ICs with new functions to meet the current market demand for consumable products. Meanwhile, to support customers for high speed and low cost end product development, foundry service providers must also continue developing new process technologies, from 0.25mum down to 32nm. Unfortunately, advances in new manufacturing process technologies also create difficulties in new IC design. These advances increase the IC design failure rate. Currently, no effective working model and system exists to solve this problem. To formulate this high IC design failure problem, this work proposes a novel engineering-chain (EC) business model. This work also proposes an engineering chain management system (ECMS) to help achieve the goals of EC, such as improving IC design success rate, reducing IC design cycle time, lowering IC design costs, and increasing revenue.