Case-based hypermedia access of `lessons learned' to accomplish technology transfer

The authors point out that the transfer of semiconductor process technology to daughter fabrication facilities is difficult due to multiple, decentralized, offline sources of expertise and documentation. the goal of the Knowledge Access project at Texas Instruments was to supply technologies to integrate and disseminate the wealth of process knowledge and lessons learned to multiple wafer fabrication sites. SHAMUS (Structured Hypertext Access Multimedia Understanding System) has been developed as an interactive real-time assistant for such technology transfer. Since problem-solving is often accomplished by relying on past experience, a case-based knowledge navigation interface is used to semantically index to obtain a nonlinear hypermedia form of the documentation. Preliminary studies indicate that this technology will assist in global harmonization